Morris's third collection (Vanishing Animals, 1975; The Bus of Dreams, 1985) shows some of the flair for yarnspinning missed in her last novel, House Arrest (1996), but repetition lessens the overall impact of the ten tales here (nine previously published). Most of this volume's characters are poised on the cusp of a change, nowhere more so than in the title story, where a teenage lifeguard, accustomed to being the lord of all he surveys, has a rude awakening when he proves deficient in the first aid needed to save a toddler on the beach. But young male protagonists are an exception; much more common are married women (like Emily in ``The Snowmaker's Wife'') who learn something profound about the emptiness of their lives. Emily's husband spends his winter nights making snow at a ski resort, but when his nocturnal absences increase she begins to suspect something else; then her fear that he's stepping out with her best friend is verified at a time when she's most vulnerable. Melanie in ``Losing Track,'' Lenore in ``The Glass-Bottom Boat,'' and the unnamed cowboy's wife in ``Around the World'' all experience epiphanies when they go to the limit of what their husbands can do for them, then step beyond on their own: Melanie during an all-night vigil in Navaho land, Lenore on a Caribbean holiday when a native opens her eyes to a world she'd denied, and the cowgirl when the carnival comes along, bringing a handsome stranger to the laundromat. We don't learn what follows these personal revelations, but Morris's implication is that her characters' lives, if not completely transformed, will at least be easier to bear. Longing and change are better personified in some situations than others here, and the marital dynamic grows stale. But there are also exquisitely revealing moments, and clearly Morris hasn't lost her touch as a story writer. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-26170-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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
........ is a disquieting examination of a central, contemporary issue, and substitutes political conscience for the spiritual concern of Greene's recent vela but the battleground is still a highly personal terrain- and an individual is the chief casualty. Tom Fowler tells the story, in an attempt to exercise his guilt, and Fowler is an Englishman, a man of middle years, of few scruples, of even less courage, and disillusioned to the point of diffidence. It is in Salgon where he is stationed as a reporter that he meets Alden Pyle of the American Economic Mission, an innocent and an idealist, who belongs to ""a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the 'u'"". They have only one thing in common-Fowler's mandarin mistress Phuong whom Pyle is ready to marry. Fowler's first act of betrayal is toward Phuong- as he conceals from her the fact that his wife- in England- will not free him. His second is toward Pyle who has been engaged with a small time local General in an attempt to back a Third Force against the Communists, and when a bomb demonstration misfires, Fowler is equally responsible for the retaliation which leads to Pyle's death... A morality tale of these times- of impulsive idealism which is often ignorance on the one hand, up against the moral inertia of the rest of the world. Indochina, and the shabby, shoddy accent of the East sharpens the background for a novel which is an effective entertainment as well. It should assure a wider audience than Robert Shaplen's A Forest of Tigers (Knopf) which deals with this theme and this part of the world.
Pub Date: March 9, 1956
ISBN: 0143039024
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1956
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