STRANGERS IN PARADISE

by Lee K. Abbott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 1986

Abbott's third book of stories (The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, 1981; Love Is the Crooked Thing, 1986) shows him still working eagerly and rambunctiously for vivid effects, but mainly on the surface of things. ""The End of Grief' is an affecting story of a man haunted by his brother's death in the Bataan Death March, but in the pieces that follow, a hyped-up boyishness of tone serves often to undercut the very substance and profundities that Abbott seems to insist repeatedly are there. A cocky and ersatz down-home humor informs ""The Beauties of Drink: An Essay,"" in which Albert Le Duc, Junior, investigates the outer limits of alcoholism, doing so rather self-indulgently. ""X"" begins as the story of a father's terrible and comic rages, then loses force as it falls in love with its own voice and degenerates into the tropes of the tall tale before succumbing still later to a wash of father-son sentimentality. A vast and threatening world-doom is said to crouch in the wings in these stories (""we are all central, I believe, to events which are leading us. . .to the dry paradise that is the end of things,"" says one narrator), but Abbott's ambitious comedy tends less to recognize the threat than to diminish and simplify responses to it. ""The World Is Almost Rotten,"" about a lifelong golf rivalry, showcases the author's magical and inventive excessiveness with words and image, yet falls prey by end to a merely breezy style and a comic-book hyperbole; war in general (""Youth on Mars"") and Vietnam in particular (""Category Z""; ""Rolling Thunder""; ""Where Is Garland Steeples Now?"") come on stage, but one feels even there that the words are getting in the way of the subject--pushing, nudging, inflating. A blithe and post-hippie contentedness, it seems, is the true foundation for the whole here, holding the fiction at the ground-level of the sentimental; in ""The World of Apples,"" an antic love story, the narrator explains, typically, that ""what we should be in our times. . .is upright, fed often, and blissful by choice."" Gifted in style, and with high claims for the deep probe, but best for those who really want only to close their eyes and listen to the music.

Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: FICTION