Stories wider in range than in power, from a writer who could grow.
The winner of Helicon’s 1999 Willa Cather Fiction Prize debuts with stories that, albeit earnest, are too effortful and familiar to take flight.
Some come closer to catching moments of real life in their hands than others—“Wind Across the Breaks,” for example, about a first-time mother who, until her baby nears death, doesn’t realize she has no milk—but even there, the psychological crux strains credibility. Similarly, in “Trailer People,” a young woman laments the squalor of a campground but not only doesn’t pull up stakes but also lets her dog off its leash after a ranger tells her not to, with the told-you-so result that it gets killed by a bear. As if her stories were clocks needing superheavy mainsprings, Norris often reduces situations or central figures to one dimension, with results the opposite of the dramatic power that’s wanted—as with the US Navy officer, stationed with his family in Manila, who’s so awful a father (“ ‘You’re a fucking bitch,’ he said in a low, menacing voice”) that his frightened daughter throws up at the dinner table (“American Primitive”). In another Manila-set tale (“Stray Dogs”), an American girl is so unhappy with life in the military compound that she steals a silver spoon of her mother’s, letting the servants take the blame: an ambitious if familiar tale that nevertheless leaves the girl’s character seeming undermotivated. Other artificially heavy villains push stories like “Prisoner of War” (Nazi-esque young men playing war games actually kill—maybe—a man) and “Interior Country” (an Alaska-set and TV-thin sort of feminist retelling of “The Killers”). Among those remaining, “Toy Guns” is psychologically thin, while “Black Ice” (two women stuck overnight in their car) and “Swimmers” (a wife’s addiction to adultery) have certain sturdy and pleasurable merits but yearn for a lighter touch.
Stories wider in range than in power, from a writer who could grow.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2000
ISBN: 1-884235-31X
Page Count: 143
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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