An uneven but fascinating collection of 20 stories (dating from 1950—68): a welcome companion volume to 1997’s The Springs of Affection, which likewise showcased the work of the late (1916—93) New Yorker staff writer. Many of the pieces here previously appeared in Brennan’s In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974). All are uniformly limpid, precisely phrased glimpses of (mostly) Irish-American women imperfectly adapting to their new lives. In several related stories, set in “Herbert’s Retreat,” a posh Hudson River enclave north of New York City, Brennan bleakly observes the social maladroitness of Leona Harkey, a parvenu trying nervously to “fit in,” and the acidulous preciosity of her permanent guest-mentor, persnickety theater critic Charles Runyon (“Taffeta? Leona, how could you!—). Another group of stories records—quite convincingly—the —adventures,” and even the thoughts and dreams, of Bluebell, an aging Labrador retriever who inhabits a fabricated milieu that’s both old-moneyed exurbia and (it seems, literally) “never-never land.” But the real heart of the collection beats in five superb tales focused with Chekhovian concentration on “little” people vulnerable to both changing personal circumstances and the simple passage of time: the irascible “ladies’-room lady” (“The Holy Terror”) who outlives her usefulness, and takes a petty, ineffectual revenge on her tormentors; the country woman (of “The Beginning of a Long Story”) too “eternally unsure of herself” to accept her family’s unconditional love; the self-deluding “artistic” couple (“The Bohemians”) who render their dutiful son unfit for any life outside their own artificial orbit. Brennan had a real genius tor tracing the downward arcs followed by people who perversely throw away their best chances for happiness. Her finest stories resemble and rival the fiction of Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, and are well worth retrieving.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-050-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
In this haunting debut, Bumas explores the defining of relationships and how the quality of human intimacy reveals much about the places we call home. All eight stories in this collection lend an ethereal element to situations that at first glance seem familiar, depicting men and women attracted and confused by friends and lovers and who find themselves equally lost in their given time and place. As the characters struggle with conflicts that range from forbidden sexual attraction to making a new best friend to unplanned pregnancy to expressing solidarity with Chinese students shortly before the uprising at Tiananmen Square, the question of where and how we live in Manhattan's East Village, a provincial Chinese city, and a conservative college campus become inextricably linked. Sometimes a story revolves around the importance of human relationship and demonstrates that without it, any possible connection to society at large, the psyche of the population, even culture and history and hope for the future, is thwarted. For example, a young Western scientist studying water quality in canals in Hangzhou, China, likes to think of this small city as a home she has come to know well; but when a Chinese co-worker she feels especially close to gets relocated for suspected sexual involvement with her, the customs, food, and the purposefulness of her work become inconceivably foreign (``Head in Fog on Water''). At other times, it is the success of a human relationship that makes an environment bearable: A gay man poses as his lesbian friend's fiancÇ to get her through a sticky family gathering (``Your Cordially Requested Presence''). Bumas woos with strong characters, wry tones, political complexity, and a unique voice. This collection doesn't bowl you over—it gets under your skin.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87023-930-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
A flat, emotionless style deadens the impact of this debut collection of short stories and a novella. Nasty and neutral men (and boys) people these stories, but a good one is hard to find. In ``Starkweather's Eyes,'' the narrator remembers the time shortly after his father left him and his mother in Nebraska, where a serial killer roamed. Carroll is ``Babyman,'' a con artist who impregnates women in order to sell the resulting children. The narrator of ``What Hurts the Fish,'' a boy spending his days with a woman named Evelyn—who wears a special prosthetic shoe because she was dropped and crippled as a baby—starts out sentimentally (``I love Evelyn, but I'm afraid of her shoe''), but soon shoots another boy in the eye with a BB gun and hides what he has done. Condon's female characters are equally unfeeling. In ``Coffee,'' a woman whose father called her ``sex-sick'' when she got pregnant at 18 coolly has sex with a man her now 11-year-old son met at the beach. ``The Velvet Shelf'' shows Natalie responding to her boyfriend being brought to her door by the police (he buried her puppy after it was run over by a car, then went back to dig it up, fearing that he'd buried it alive) by taking it as an opportunity to break up with him. There is plenty of violence too. In ``The Emptyheart Boy'' a recently divorced man listens to his female neighbor being abused by three low-lifes without doing anything, even when his girlfriend urges him to, because ``down deep I was afraid of people, period.'' The short novella ``River Street'' follows a drifter to a sleazy motel where he is attacked and raped. Too macho for its own good.
Pub Date: Dec. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-87074-372-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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