Exquisite work from a most unusual master craftsman who’s one of his continent’s finest writers.
Kitchen-sink realism and fantastic hyperbole are skillfully blended in this entertaining collection of 14 stories by the Australian author of the highly praised Eucalyptus (1998), etc.
Most of the briefer stories, which suggest a cross between Orwell and Kafka, focus on eccentrics and obsessives at odds with either domestic complacency or bureaucratic imperatives—and, generally, those spun from the more bizarre premises work best. For example, in “Life of the Party,” a suburbanite hiding in his son’s tree house spies on neighbors he’s invited to a nonexistent barbecue; “Portrait of Electricity” takes the form of a tour of a museum memorializing a deceased “great man”; and the smalltime investor in “ore” is physically transformed (literally) by his avarice and finickiness. A darker note is struck in “The Drover’s Wife,” narrated by a dentist whose wife had left him 30 years earlier, and who “finds” her again, as the subject of a vividly realistic painting—which reveals, as do his ingenuous memories of her, an irrepressible spirit unforgivably stifled by his own prudishness and dullness. The best of the longer tales include “Huebler,” an amusing fable whose eponymous protagonist aspires to photograph every living human; and “The Seduction of My Sister,” whose unnamed narrator describes his adventure with another teenaged boy, tossing old phonograph records over a rooftop, then catching them as they fall. The “game” escalates, including ever-bulkier objects (and becoming a perfect metaphor for adolescent bravado, rebelliousness, and emergent sexuality), as the story moves surely toward its memorable magical-realist ending. Even better is “Camouflage,” the tale of a passive, self-effacing piano tuner who is drafted into the Australian Army in 1943, and finds muted fulfillment in a menial task that is, in its way, a rudimentary “art.” It’s a wonderful story, reminiscent of Bernard Malamud at his most inspired.
Exquisite work from a most unusual master craftsman who’s one of his continent’s finest writers.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11827-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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