A strong debut from a writer who probes the inner lives of her female subjects with both purpose and humor.
Young women eye their futures with the practiced skepticism of people who have already seen far too much.
The stories in Adelmann’s debut collection feature women and girls adrift in the world. From broken homes, broken relationships, broken senses of their own identities, the narrators of these stories explore worlds marked by a bleak sense of anonymity—in these largely urban tales, all faces seem to be faces in the crowd. Many of the stories capture their narrators' inner monologues in a way that is both believable and illuminating. In “Pets Are for Rich Kids,” Ashley’s friendship with the gratingly precocious Willa is marked by the inequalities of their social situations. Willa is the pampered daughter of wealthy parents who buy her pets to teach her lessons about responsibility and, inevitably, power while Ashley is the child of a struggling newly single mother who can't understand why no one else sees “how dumb it [is] that the things you [are] supposed to love are always running away or dying.” Willa tries to teach Ashley not to be so “callous” by giving her the unasked-for responsibility of a guinea pig, and the resulting conflict between the girls focuses on the dynamics of real rage and performative kindness. Similarly, “Middlemen,” another standout piece, explores the narrator’s relationship with her roommate, Grace, the pampered daughter of emotionally abusive parents, who instigates a sexual aspect to their friendship—but only when someone else is looking. Many of the narrators are in the middle of what seem likely to be their lives’ defining crises. There is a young wife who has run over her abusive husband’s dog (“The Replacements”); a young wife whose husband is leaving to go to war (“How To Wait”); and a lonely 20-something, set adrift by trauma, looking for solace in too much alcohol and too many women (“Human Bonding”). The similarity among the subjects can sometimes overwhelm the experience of reading the individual pieces. But when read independently, the stories linger, clearly illuminated by their artistry, honesty, and pervasive courage.
A strong debut from a writer who probes the inner lives of her female subjects with both purpose and humor.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-45081-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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