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MOTHERS

Name: MOTHERS
Author: Katrina Kenison
ISBN: 0-86547-498-2

TWENTY STORIES OF CONTEMPORARY MOTHERHOOD

edited by Katrina Kenison & Kathleen Hirsch ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1996

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``I could feel my life changing, the old familiar parts of it crumbling away and a new shape emerging.'' The narrator of Mary Grimm's ``Before,'' reflecting on her emotions as she is being wheeled into a delivery room, sounds a note repeated, with some artful variations, in many of the reprinted tales in this diverse collection: Motherhood changes everything. Another theme, succinctly rendered in Barbara Kingsolver's ``Quality Time'' (from Homeland, 1989), is that ``Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.'' Most of these stories, dwelling on the complex negotiations of mothers and young children, are exact but hopeful. In ``Starlight'' (from Floating, 1984), Marian Thurm catches the delicate growth of trust and affection between a mother and her two young sons, separated by a divorce. ``Chances with Johnson,'' from White Boys and River Girls (1995) by Paula K. Gover, traces the struggles of a single mother to provide some sense of security and certainty for her son. There are several grimly downbeat works as well: A young, drug-addled mother in ``Pagan Night,'' by Kate Braverman, plots how to murder her child, and in ``King of the Sky,'' by Roxana Robinson, a battle of wills between a mother and her son culminates in tragedy. Strong stories, a startling variety of voices, and some very precise meditations on the nature of modern motherhood combine to create a unique, useful, moving anthology.

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-86547-498-2

Page Count: 228

Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MAGICAL JOURNEY
by Katrina Kenison

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GIFT OF AN ORDINARY DAY
by Katrina Kenison

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES 2000
edited by E.L. Doctorow & Katrina Kenison

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MISERY

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 1987

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Fans weary of King's recent unwieldy tomes can rest easy: his newest is slim, slick, and razor-keen. His first novel without supernatural elements outside of the Richard Bachman series, this psychological terror tale laced with pitch-black humor tells the nerve-jangling story of a best-selling author kidnapped and tortured by his "number one fan." King opens on a disorienting note as writer Paul Sheldon drifts awake to find himself in bed, his legs shattered. A beefy woman, 40-ish Annie Wilkes, appears and feeds him barbiturates. During the hazy next week, Paul learns that Annie, an ex-nurse, carried him from a car wreck to her isolated house, where she plans to keep him indefinitely. She's a spiteful misanthrope subject to catatonic fits, but worships Paul because he writes her favorite books, historical novels featuring the heroine "Misery." As Annie pumps him with drugs and reads the script of his latest novel, also saved from the wreck, Paul waits with growing apprehension—he killed off Misery in this new one. tn time, Annie rushes into the room, howling: she demands that Paul write a new novel resurrecting Misery just for her. He refuses until she threatens to withhold his drugs; so he begins the book (tantalizing chunks of which King seeds throughout this novel). Days later, when Annie goes to town, Paul, who's now in a wheelchair, escapes his locked room and finds a scrapbook with clippings of Annie's hobby: she's a mass-murderer. Up to here, King has gleefully slathered on the tension: now he slams on the shocks as Annie returns swinging an axe and chops off Paul's foot. Soon after, off comes his thumb; when a cop looking for Paul shows up, Annie lawnmowers his head. Burning for revenge, Paul finishes his novel, only to use the manuscript as a weapon against his captor in the ironic, ferocious climax. Although lacking the psychological richness of his best work, this nasty shard of a novel with its weird autobiographical implications probably will thrill and chill King's legion of fans. Note: the publisher plans an unprecedented first printing of one-million copies.

Pub Date: June 8, 1987

ISBN: 0451169522

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLLY
by Stephen King

- BOOK TO SCREEN
RIP James Caan, Star of Book-to-Screen Classics

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TREE OF SMOKE

by Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family...

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Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war—and the war novel—it deserves.

At the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. His military involvement in Asia preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has continued to operate as a CIA agent within the shadows of Vietnam, while perhaps answering to no authority higher than his own.
From World War II through the war in Vietnam, much has changed—allegiances and alliances, public sentiment, the modes of modern warfare. Yet the Colonel hasn’t—he won’t or he can’t. Though he is plainly the novel’s pivotal figure, Johnson spends more time inside the psyche of the Colonel’s nephew, William “Skip” Sands, whose father died in action and whose enlistment extends a family tradition. He’s as naïve as the Colonel is worldly, as filled with self-doubt as his uncle is free of it, but he ultimately joins his relative in psychological operations against the enemy—whomever that may be. Eventually, he must decide whether it is possible to serve both his legendary relative and his country.
A less engaging subplot concerns half-brothers Bill and James Houston, who enter the war as teenagers to escape their dead-end lives in Arizona. Where the Sands family operates on the periphery of the war, the Houstons are deep in the muck of it. Though they are what once might have been called cannon fodder, the war gives their lives definition and a sense of mission, of destiny, that is missing back home—which will never again feel like home after Vietnam.

It’s more than coincidence that the novel features two sets of relatives whose blood ties are once removed, for the family that one chooses is ultimately more important than the family into which one happens to be born. Thus it is all the more imperative to choose wisely—and all the more difficult, given the duplicity that the war seems to require for self-preservation. As the novel obliterates all distinctions between good and evil, allies and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, it sustains the suspense of who will survive long enough to have the last word.