Tales of spare, unflinching beauty show how love and loneliness can occupy a heart together.
“Urban/suburban women" experience the extremes of mother love—and its cost—in Walbert’s (His Favorites, 2018, etc.) volume of new and selected stories.
The opening story, “M&M World," sets the tone as a divorced New Yorker is seized with anxiety when she momentarily can’t find one of her daughters on an outing to Times Square. For Walbert’s financially secure but emotionally shaky white women, maternal love is both overpowering and deeply stressful. Friendship is at best a temporary salve for women socializing uneasily, if tipsily, during their daughters’ get-together in “Playdate.” Several stories look back to earlier times, when women were only beginning to explore the possibility of mutual support: In “The Blue Hour,” narrator Marion (who may or may not be the dead mother Marion mourned by a daughter in “Paris, 1994”) recalls her brief but intense friendship as a young mother in Rochester with a woman who couldn’t fit into the staid norms of the time and later committed suicide; in “Conversation,” ladies from “the faster set” in a Vietnam War–era suburban development attempt a “rap session” while the hostess’s black maid serves drinks until eventually joining in. “To Do,” about a teenage girl covering for her mother’s alcoholism—most of the women in these stories drink—is told from the point of view of the resentful grown daughter. But most of Walbert’s mothers, even the drinkers, cherish their children, especially when the child has special needs (“A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes”), is emotionally damaged (“Esperanza”), or even dead (“Do Something”). “Radical Feminists” is the only story prominently featuring a man. The protagonist runs into her former boss, who once made her choose between a burgeoning career and motherhood. She adores her sons but still harbors vengeance fantasies toward her ex-boss. Oddly, the title story concerns the volume’s one successful professional, a widowed professor long past mothering. Reminiscent of Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” she escapes routine life by driving rainy streets, giving rides to strangers with whom she shares her stories.
Tales of spare, unflinching beauty show how love and loneliness can occupy a heart together.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9942-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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