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THE SUMMER BEFORE THE SUMMER OF LOVE

STORIES

A brilliant collection of ten replete portrayals of family life, from an emerging storyteller (A Hole in the Language, 1990) whose generous command of the depth and range of her characters' lives suggests an American Alice Munro in the making. Marriage, parenthood, separation, and the desolating variety of loss are the emotional coordinates of Swick's fictional territorywhose geographic polarities are Nebraska and southern California. Her people, all unhinged by the miscellaneous pressures of relationship, include a divorcÇe (``The Other Widow'') surreptitiously mourning the sudden death of her married lover, teenage sisters who (in the title story) expertly play their estranged parents against each other, and a rootless twentysomething (in ``Moscow Nights'') who's just been dumped by his girlfriend and who's drawn into reluctant complicity with his divorced mother's adventurous new lifestyle (including her abortion). Swick's characters brood guiltily over their own failings; many, like ``The Prodigal Father,'' eerily envision the worst that lies ahead of the messes they've made of their lives. Nevertheless, her stories crackle with crisp, witty metaphors and observations (``she feels like some character in a soap opera, only not as well-dressed''). Her men are every bit as convincing and winning as her women. In ``The Still Point,'' a frustrated wife ditches her luckless failure of a husband, a ``repeat victim'' whose espousal of Zen Buddhism leads the story in several surprising directions. In ``Crete,'' a college teacher whose untroubled life contrasts sharply with his wife's history of violence and loss, is brought to a totally unexpected point of empathy with the sensibility he has never managed to share. And in the nerve-racking ``Sleeping Dogs,'' Swick's most ingeniously plotted story, a frightened husband and father discovers that his character failings endanger the family he now knows he loves above all else. Swick's richly composed stories appear frequently in The Atlantic and the quarterlies. One of our most visible storytellers, she is rapidly becoming one of our best.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1995

ISBN: 0-06-017254-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995

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A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY

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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BEYOND THE GREAT SNOW MOUNTAINS

Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.

Pub Date: May 11, 1999

ISBN: 0-553-10963-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999

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