A debut collection of nine stories by novelist Honig (Picking Up, 1986), who was awarded the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her efforts. Honig is not exactly a new writer, but her stories have that sketchy feel common to neophytes: a rough, I—m-not-really-sure- if-this-is-done-or-not tone that predominates in writing programs and is usually outgrown a few years after first publication. Many of the works here are quite literally sketches—portraits, that is, in which nothing much happens, rather than narratives of activity. “No Friends, All Strangers,” for example, portrays the life of a young woman working in a beauty parlor: she talks to her boss, rides the subway, wonders about the other passengers and their lives—and does little of interest overall. “English as a Second Language” offers a more conscious attempt to construct a narrative by showing the efforts of a young immigrant to collect the folk tales and personal histories of her classmates, but it neglects to give much insight into the woman’s own experiences. “Hilda” is a more standard coming-of-age story. Here, a young woman reconstructs the life of the elderly spinster aunt who became her close friend during childhood and now represents for her the passage of time and maturity. “Sights of Cork” differs markedly in style and tone from the other stories: it describes a trip to a little town in Ireland, taken together by a young American tourist who visits it for the first time and a mysterious stranger who has apparently spent some time fleeing from it. Understated and eerie, it’s the best here, far superior to the title story, which is part of a quartet portraying the home lives of several women who work together in a social services agency in New York. As in many first collections, the phrases are sharp, the sentences firm, the paragraphs taut—but they don—t add up to much in the way of stories.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8229-4107-4
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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