A mixed effort with some real high points.
A collection of short, melancholy stories focusing on Russian immigrants to the United States.
The short stories in this debut collection chronicle the lives of characters beset by persistent regrets and dissatisfactions. Most of the central figures are Russian, and many have immigrated or are considering immigrating to the United States. Gorcheva-Newberry, herself a Russian émigré, displays a keen understanding of her home country’s cultural particularities in some of her collection’s finest stories: In “Heroes of Our Time,” a teenage boy ventures into Moscow in the spring of 1991 to attempt to recruit a sex worker on behalf of his ailing grandfather only to accidentally find himself entangled with a militant pro-aristocracy group. In “Boys on the Moskva River,” the narrator remembers the life and violent death of his brother, Konstantin, whom their mother preferred and who was involved with organized crime. Gorcheva-Newberry’s prose is clear and can quickly cut to the marrow of a complex emotional experience: In “The Suicide Note,” a Russian immigrant reflects, “I thought how hard it was to make someone laugh in a foreign language. And if you couldn’t laugh together, how could you live together? In that sense America remained a mystery to me.” For all its strengths, however, this collection is a frustrating experience. Gorcheva-Newberry’s skills as a prose stylist do not extend to dialogue, and many of her characters state their feelings in an unrealistically straightforward way. The collection’s weakest stories lack the cultural and psychological specificity of its strongest and detract from the reading experience. “Simple Song #9,” for instance, follows the romance and breakup of archetypal characters named “Boy” and “Girl,” featuring dreary sentences like, “Girl meets Man.” Gorcheva-Newberry is on firmer and more rewarding territory in her more conventional stories.
A mixed effort with some real high points.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4962-2913-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
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SEEN & HEARD
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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