The best reflect Binchy’s warmhearted sympathy for yearning and regret.
An uneven collection by the prolific Binchy (Maeve’s Times, 2014, etc.).
In a foreword to these 36 tales, Gordon Snell notes that his wife, who died in 2012, “was always full of stories” that she typed “at breakneck speed.” This selection, he says, represents just part of her output, hinting that more volumes are to come, good news for readers who love Binchy’s take on familiar domestic dramas among women and their friends, lovers, husbands, children, and assorted relatives in contemporary Ireland. Marriage is a recurring theme: some women want to find a husband, which often happens when they least expect it; others want to hold onto the husband they have, such as Bella, who decides that if she just loses a lot of weight, “dramatically,” Jim will not marry his young lover, who she imagines is “a skinny little thing,” and she and Jim will live happily ever after. In the world Binchy gently recounts, men are always tempted, and women need to be on their guards. In “Big Decisions in Brussels,” Maura’s aunt advises her to read her handsome husband’s letters and “go through his pockets.” That strategy, Maura reflects, has enabled her “to head off some mild flirtations in the past” by arranging family diversions “when a little adventure was looming.” Even beautiful 28-year-old Laura knows she can’t trust her wealthy older husband, “the tycoon.” Any relationships—whether between spouses, friends, or family—are fragile; it’s better to keep silent and hide unhappiness, even from oneself. When the unmarried 30-somethings Miss McCarthy and Mr. Blake go out for dinner, “by no glance did they let the other know that this was something...[that] might become big.” Some stories are developed enough to impart quiet wisdom; others, though, are mere sketches, with one-dimensional characters and pat, trite resolutions.
The best reflect Binchy’s warmhearted sympathy for yearning and regret.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94741-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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