A gritty, emotionally sensitive clutch of stories.
A debut story collection about hard-luck denizens of rural and exurban Iowa.
The heartland, as captured in Lesmeister’s debut, is a downcast place, replete with meth shacks, mortality, and regret. The narrator of “Burrowing Animals” is a recovering addict who’s desperate to prove he’s worthy of seeing his children again; in “Lie Here Next to Me,” a young woman tries to protect her dying mother from her grandmother’s interventions; in “A Real Future,” one of the few black residents of a rural county endures a series of headaches and humiliations from everyone from DMV workers to people judging his marriage to a white woman. Lesmeister’s vision of Iowa isn't exclusively somber, though. He can bring wit and lightness to these dirty-realist tales, as in “Today You’re Calling Me Lou,” in which the narrator ferries his foulmouthed, no-nonsense grandmother to a garage sale. (“She laughs and it sounds like motor oil gurgling around her lungs.”) He can also craft tender characterizations, as in “Between the Fireflies,” in which two fifth-graders are charged with shooting rabbits approaching a neighborhood garden, a task lightly in parallel to the girl’s father’s deployment in the Middle East. And like any good short story writer, he can deliver an eye-catching opening (“Elbow and I ducked out of our nephew’s birthday party and drove to Walmart to check on ammo prices”), though a broader canvas might improve some of these stories, which sometimes close on notes of pat ambiguity. But for a first-timer, Lesmeister has developed an admirably concise style and a knack for capturing people during difficult coming-of-age moments or dispiriting processes of decline. Like the amateur cowherds in the title story, they’re recognizing that life is often disorderly, with help hard to come by.
A gritty, emotionally sensitive clutch of stories.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944850-05-0
Page Count: 211
Publisher: MG Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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