Even when repetitive (two stories about neurotical, sensitive piano-playing young boys?), the offerings are consistently...
The always-excellent Houghton Mifflin “Best,” with an entertaining twist.
Chabon offers a refreshing defense of “entertainment” in the introduction, arguing that determining the “best” stories is impossible. He instead presents those that simply pleased him most. The collection draws heavily from the requisite publications (the New Yorker, etc.) and the MFA feedline. Up-and-comers are rare. Working through the plentiful fractured-middle-class-family tales, we meet creepy animals (Kelly Link’s lovely, haunted “Stone Animals” and David Mean’s philosophy-infused “Secret Goldfish”) and even creepier people (Joy Williams’s razor-sharp strangeness in “The Girls” and Nathaniel Bellows’s tender portrait of loneliness and near-pedophilia, “First Four Measures”), as well as more straightforward, beautifully realized characters, from Tom Perotta, Lynne Sharon Schwartz and the short form’s impresario, Alice Munro. An equal number of stories feature exiles and the down-and-out and. Of these, Edward P. Jones’s gritty, heartfelt prison tale “Old Boys, Old Girls” and Charles D’Ambrosio’s spooky, endearing drifters in “The Scheme of Things” are notable, as are the immigrant tales from Rishi Reddi and David Bezmozgis. Linguistic innovation is evident throughout, from Reddi’s striking rendition of Indian English to the musical speech of George Saunders’s wonderful “Bohemians.” Genre-bending also appears throughout, at its best in the Calvino-esque series of parables in J. Robert Lennon’s “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand,” and the good humor of Tim Pratt’s Wild West fantasy “Hart and Boot.” Indeed, humor—from black-gallows to gentle chuckles—leavens the entire collection.
Even when repetitive (two stories about neurotical, sensitive piano-playing young boys?), the offerings are consistently interesting and often wonderfully weird.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-42349-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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