The random adventures of life stitched together and explained with unconventional devices—that both do and don’t work.
Thirteen loosely connected stories of rural Canada less about sex and death than about everything else.
The Manitoba-born Patterson (a memoir, The Water In Between, 2000) often delivers miniature essays amid his stories on subjects as far-ranging as emperor penguins and the utilitarian aesthetics of rope, while a consistent theme is the emotional cabin fever that’s as much a result of the landscape of the title as it is of a standard and familiar domesticity. The people here are as likely to reach out to others as they are to turn on one another. “Gabriella: Parts One and Two” is about an ex-soldier who finds himself sharing an apartment with two Spanish women—in a story that aspires to realism by going nowhere. “Saw Marks” is the frailest of plot adumbrations hung on a piece of seemingly straight nonfiction about man’s prehistory in the Serengeti. In “The Perseid Shower,” a boy’s generalized disappointment with his father finds its focus in dad’s preoccupation with incinerator drums, model airplanes, and the yearly meteor shower. And “Insomnia, Infidelity, and the Leopard Seal” is a lesson on mood disorders as manifested in a character’s sleep deprivation—and before it cures our insomnia we’re sure to find out what happens to those emperor penguins. Patterson’s attempt to tie his pieces together by ending each with “This was in 1980” or “This was in 2004,” etc., gives a feeling that each story amounts to a kind of journal entry: the connected-story premise disconnects, and one wishes that Patterson’s talent for disparate narrative voices were hung on a strategy less flimsy. Still, sometimes the static voice of essay comes to stand perfectly for these people and this place: “A static structure bears perpendicular surfaces well. The column reliably supports loads only when vertical and straight; when gravity is the only antagonist, flat continuous planes at right angles to one another . . . .”
The random adventures of life stitched together and explained with unconventional devices—that both do and don’t work.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50627-9
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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