Precise, shrewd tales by a prodigiously talented but still too-little-known writer. Nelson (Language in the Blood, 1991, etc.) offers an enthralling refresher course in the exploration of character. Each of the 13 tales here use a character’s dedication (or addiction) to a sport to plumb hesitations and hopes. In “A False Encounter,” a grieving son is driven to investigate why his seemingly happy father committed suicide. The quest eventually leads him back to a group of his father’s college friends, all of them accomplished amateur boxers. The key to his father’s behavior, it turns out, is hidden in a moment of triumph in his youth when, against all expectations, he was able to rise from the canvas after devastating blow. Such exhilarating, defining moments, Nelson suggests, both shape and haunt us. What happens when one discovers that these moments are singular and unsurpassable? The appropriately named “Death Valley— offers quite a different view of sports: a wealthy and accomplished, diffident young professional golfer visits her lover, a groundskeeper at a golf course in the California desert. Golf has helped to insulate her from the world, and her self-absorption and life of privilege are both called into question when she collides with the hard, sad lives of a group of migrant laborers camped close to the links.”Every Day a Promise” perfectly catches the unwillingness of a track champ to give up his dream of the Olympics. “The Invisible— offers a droll, somewhat mystical celebration of the way in which a star college quarterback wins back his soul from the coaches, boosters, and agents. And “The Squash Player” works out an artful variation on the theme of the aging athlete, as a man struggles to find his place in a world in which he’s no longer physically dominant. Moving, fresh, perceptive work, and further evidence of Nelson’s considerable skills.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-891369-05-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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