That rarest and most refreshing sort of short story anthology: an eye-opener.
Gripping anthology of the unexpected from a cabal of A-list authors—but don’t look for their names in the table of contents.
Inspired by a demolition-derby driver who always won because he drove like he had nothing to lose, editor Parent (Turning Stones, 1996, etc.) cajoled a batch of star scribblers, from Michael Connelly and Alice Sebold to Sebastian Junger and Rosie O’Donnell, to contribute short stories anonymously, freeing them from the sometimes weighty expectations their names can bring. The results run the gamut from stunningly good to just plain okay to embarrassing. Of the middle category are such page-fillers as “An Eye for an Eye,” a portrait of a strained marriage that’s as finely crafted as it is bloodless and rote. “A Country Like No Other” is something quite different. It follows a pair of young American journalists through the ragged edges of a West African conflict packed full of everyday horror and the banality of evil. The story’s world-weariness somehow feels fresh, as though the naïve writer and his jaundiced, cynical buddy weren’t a trope as old as the hills. Another standout is “Wonderland,” which seems to have Alice Sebold’s name all over it. In this sharp shock of a piece, a shallow New York fashion magazine editor recollects her college affair with a Puerto Rican janitor and the tragedy that brought her and the man’s young daughter together. Simultaneously wistful, hateful, funny, honest and utterly self-serving, it’s a damning portrait of class prejudice that any writer would be smart to want to claim as her own.
That rarest and most refreshing sort of short story anthology: an eye-opener.Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6264-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
By the author’s standards, this is taut, trim storytelling, though it characteristically makes all sorts of connections and...
The earmarks of the renowned novelist’s work are here—the impressive intellect, the patterns connecting music and science and so much else, the classical grounding of the narrative—but rarely have his novels been so tightly focused and emotionally compelling.
With his “genius” certified by a MacArthur grant, Powers (Generosity, 2009, etc.) has a tendency to intimidate some readers with novels overstuffed with ideas that tend to unfold like multilayered puzzles. His new one (and first for a new publisher) might be a good place for newcomers to begin while rewarding the allegiance of his faithful readership. His Orpheus of the updated Greek myth (which the novel only loosely follows) is a postmodern composer who lost his family to his musical quest; his teaching position to his age and the economy; and his early aspirations to study chemistry to the love of a musical woman who left him. At the start of the novel, he is pursuing his recent hobby in his home lab as “a do-it-yourself genetic engineer,” hoping for “only one thing before he dies: to break free of time and hear the future.” Otherwise, his motives remain a mystery to the reader and to the novel’s other characters, particularly after discovery of his DNA experiments (following the death of his faithful dog and musical companion, Fidelio) sends him on the lam as a suspected bioterrorist and turns his story viral. While rooted in Greek mythology, this is a very contemporary story of cybertechnology, fear run rampant, political repression of art and the essence of music (its progression, its timelessness). “How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?” asks protagonist Peter Els, surely one of the most soulful characters that the novelist has ever conjured. Els looks back over his life for much of the narrative, showing how his values, priorities, quests and misjudgments have (inevitably?) put him into the predicament where he finds itself.
By the author’s standards, this is taut, trim storytelling, though it characteristically makes all sorts of connections and proceeds on a number of different levels.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24082-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's—to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home"—who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with—two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose—in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1985
ISBN: 0345452003
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
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