Stories filled with dark wit in the tradition of Amy Hempel and Joy Williams.
A collection that examine the absurdities of modern life.
In the title story of Homes’ (May We Be Forgiven, 2012, etc.) latest collection, a love affair is sparked between former friends when they are reunited at a genocide conference. The strangeness of this serves to illuminate the complex depths of their emotional states. It also creates opportunities for dark humor. As the conference begins, the leader poses the big question: “Why do Genocide(S) continue to happen?” And then “He goes on to thank their sponsors.” “A Prize for Every Player” carries on the theme of consumerism. It opens with a family competing “boys versus girls” in an elaborate version of Supermarket Sweep. After finding a human baby in an aisle, Tom—the father—launches into a long, nostalgic monologue about America. Throughout the book, dialogue is given tremendous weight and space. Characters speak in full paragraphs, and where there is self-awareness about that, it is quirky and fun. When shoppers overhear Tom, they convince him to run for president. Too often, however, such awareness is lacking. This is most glaringly the case in “The National Cage Bird Show,” a story told entirely through messages in a chat room for bird owners. Even when there is an actual narrator, Homes shies away from exposition, forcing her characters to say too much. Nonetheless, there are many true gems of conversation. “Her face is ruined," a mother says in “Hello Everybody.” It is the first thing she says upon seeing her child in the hospital after a grizzly car accident. "I’m calling Dr. Pecker…if there’s anyone he’ll come in off the golf course for, it’s me." " ‘Leave it,’ the daughter [begs]. ‘I’ll look like I’ve lived.’ "
Stories filled with dark wit in the tradition of Amy Hempel and Joy Williams.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-670-02549-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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