An iffy debut collection of nine stories and a novella: the chip on the author's shoulder is a tremendous distraction from her natural style and distinctive voice. An integration of sexuality and sport infuses these pieces, in which straight characters are, with few exceptions, evil bigots or mindless glamour gals. Some of the stories, as well, are just too slight: ``The Rescue'' is barely a sketch, its straight woman, Meredith, an easy target; and ``Sex Is an Ancient Practice'' lacks any irony or larger context. In the title story, a frustrated and recently dumped high-school basketball coach makes a pass at a needy young player in a darkened gym, and the sympathy appears to be with the coach; at the very least, the unsettling questions of the student's age and the coach's position of authority are glossed over. ``Under the Caba§a,'' with its not-yet-realized-lesbian heroine, suffers from a coy suggestiveness, while ``The Pass'' has the opposite probleman overstated case. High spots do emerge, however: In ``The Night Danny Was Raped,'' a clever stylistic techniquea core sentence is built uponis woven through a fully fleshed-out narrative with a vivid, believable protagonist. But ``The Place Before Language,'' the concluding novella—about a summer ranger on Mount Rainier who discovers an affair between fire-lookout chief Elise and Barbara, the wife of the Ranger Supervisorreverts to a lesbian-against-the-elements subtext that's by now worn thin. In the end, the connection between athleticism and lesbianismBledsoe's central focusseems a forced and tenuous stretch. Bledsoe has the tools to write for an unmodified general audience, but here her subject matter holds her back to alienatingand limitingeffect.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1995
ISBN: 1-878067-64-8
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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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
Categories: SHORT STORIES
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES
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