Only the title story, an anti-elegy for a World Trade Center victim, demonstrates explicitly how apt Hughes’s title is, for...
Everything about this slender collection of 11 stories from Hughes (Wavemaker II, 2001) rings true except for its ironic title.
Two stories set the pattern for the others. In “Guidance,” an amusingly nitwit leg model named Fawn, spirited off to Jakarta by her much older bridegroom, offers fatuous observations about Indonesia’s deeply polarized economic climate as she gradually reveals what she’s scarcely noticed herself: The have-nots have abducted her as a hostage. In “Rome,” Olivia, a sensitive daughter necessarily kept blind to the realities of her parents’ uneasy marriage, gets a glimmer of their secrets. The other stories feature adults who have to work harder to ignore the harsh facts of life but mostly manage to do so by concentrating obsessively on minutely rendered details. The mother in the lapidary “May Day” thinks about the waves off the marina, the spring flowers—anything but the impending arrival of her estranged daughter Melody. The dutiful dancer in “Pelican Song” does her best to help her mother escape the new husband whose abuse her mother is determined to overlook. The hero of “Roundup” focuses on the breakup of his architectural firm but ignores the more seismic shifts in his family. The title character in “The Widow of Combarelles,” juggling problems great and small, only gradually realizes how much deeper her friend Coren’s pain is than her own. In “Blue Grass,” a young woman struggles to come to terms with her sister’s death from cancer through a complex dance of memory and denial. In “Horse,” a foundering Atlantic City honeymoon is both mirrored and salvaged by the couple’s preoccupation with the famous Diving Horse’s refusal to dive. “The Aces,” the most conventional of the bunch, uses a second honeymoon to Rome to motivate a series of flashbacks showing the marriage declining because the partners just don’t get it.
Only the title story, an anti-elegy for a World Trade Center victim, demonstrates explicitly how apt Hughes’s title is, for the mourners’ happiness is so rare and fleeting that they’re doubly happy to feel happy.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7074-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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
SEEN & HEARD
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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