by Larry Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 26, 2019
Compassionate and gritty and lyrical—a master class.
A career-spanning collection by a master of American realism.
When he decided to become a writer in 1980, Brown (A Miracle of Catfish, 2007, etc.) was a 29-year-old father, husband, and firefighter; he had never written fiction before. Fifteen years after his death, this sweeping collection charts Brown’s progress from tyro to master. It begins with “Plant Growin’ Problems,” Brown’s first publication, which appeared in Easyriders (yes, the motorcycle magazine) in 1982. The story is nothing special on its own—chronicling a marijuana-farming motorcyclist’s cartoonishly fateful run-in with a crooked sheriff—but, fascinatingly, it contains trace levels of the complicated humanism that characterizes Brown’s later work. In his debut collection, Facing the Music (1988), Brown is visibly casting around for his proper form. “Boy and Dog,” for example, is composed entirely of five-word sentences (e.g. “The dog was already dead”) and reads like an experiment. “The Rich,” meanwhile, set in a travel agency, is a language-driven social satire: “The rich often wear gold chains around their necks. Most of the rich wear diamond rings. Some of the rich wear gold bones in their noses. A lot of the rich, especially the older rich, have been surgically renovated. The rich can afford tucks and snips.” In between these experiments, however, Brown explores topics like alcoholism, infidelity, codependence, pity, shame, and emotional hypocrisy—topics that recur in his second collection, Big Bad Love (1990), and in the uncollected stories he wrote later. Some readers will be put off by Brown’s female characters, many of whom are appreciated (or not) for their sexual appeal (or perceived lack of it); others will be put off by the casual racism expressed by the otherwise positively portrayed (even idealized) World War II veteran at the center of “Old Soldiers.” Distasteful though some elements of Brown’s fiction can be, these contradictions—that certain men, desperate to be loved by women, can only notice them for their bodies; that a beloved father figure can also house within him unpardonable biases—are a collateral aspect of Brown’s chief strength as a fiction writer: He is intensely compassionate, and he extends this compassion to everyone; this includes the cruel sheriff in “Plant Growin’ Problems”; it includes the mentally disturbed genital flasher in the heartbreaking “Waiting for the Ladies”; it includes men and women—in “Kubuku Rides (This Is It),” in “Tiny Love,” in “Wild Thing”—who, in their lonely and self-destructive love for the bottle, systematically erode their connections to the only people in the world who love them.
Compassionate and gritty and lyrical—a master class.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-975-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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by Larry Brown
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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