A disappointment, especially for a debut writer with such publishing credentials.
A first collection from a young author whose work has appeared in Harper’s and the New Yorker, where he was featured as a 2001 Debut Fiction Writer.
Nesbitt’s ten stories have appealingly cryptic titles such as “Chimp Shrink & Backwards” and “Man in Towel with Gun,” and each presents a wry, sometimes helpless, always young black male narrator. Often these protagonists find themselves in boring but amusing occupations: cleaning up a deer carcass in “Quality Fuel for Electric Living”; running a volatile nightclub in “Thursday the 16th”; or working at a second-tier zoo in the title story. Sometimes—as in “The Ones Who May Kill You in the Morning,” about “The Help” at an obnoxious rich man’s party—these situations lead to danger or confrontation, but most of the pieces feel unresolved. From their “weird” environments, Nesbitt’s narrators deliver ironic jabs at the world: one has a girlfriend who “kisses like a mule biting a carrot,” while another opens his tale by saying, “My dad lost his left leg, so he has to drive an automatic.” Such comic lines are sometimes right-on; more often than not, though, they fall flat—a flatness compounded by the fact that all ten narrators sound identical. They usually drink too much, but they seem to do this not out of need but because their author couldn’t contrive anything else for them to do. Still, the monotony of character is not the problem here: the real difficulty is that in the absence of well-drawn characters, your attention naturally shifts to the plot; and in the absence of anything coherent or dramatic happening in these stories, your attention shifts to the style. Nesbitt’s style, though often bold and winning, can’t carry the whole load, and so the most engaging aspect of this collection is its titles.
A disappointment, especially for a debut writer with such publishing credentials.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1709-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
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: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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