Classic examples of the art of short fiction, capturing the variety of human experience with sophisticated economy.
Esteemed in her lifetime but largely forgotten today, short story master Hale (1908-1988) gets a welcome reintroduction in this collection of 25 astute, finely wrought tales.
Novelist Groff, who made the judicious selections, also provides an introduction sketching the writer’s background: Born into Boston’s Yankee aristocracy, the daughter of bohemians without a lot of money, Hale was a debutante who cast a cold eye on the class she came from while enjoying its glamorous accoutrements. The early stories from the 1930s and early 1940s have backgrounds that would have been familiar to Fitzgerald: coming-out parties, jazz orchestras, Ivy League athletics, fast driving in fancy cars. Yet they paint quietly acid pictures of Southern snobbery (“That Woman”), male dominance masking fragility (“Crimson Autumn”), and ethnic tensions in summer communities (“To the North”). Hale is rarely overtly political, but two stories from the '40s, “Those Are as Brothers” and “The Marching Feet,” stingingly make the point that fascism has home-grown versions. Long before the feminist movement was reborn, she acknowledged women’s ambivalence about having children (“The Bubble”) and the potential oppressiveness of marriage (“Sunday—1913”). Hale’s personal experience of mental illness sparks some of the collection's best work: “Who Lived and Died Believing” expertly blends a harrowing account of electric shock treatment with a sharp portrait of a kind nurse’s romance with a callous resident; “Some Day I’ll Find You…” and “Miss August” both anatomize intricate social interactions in psychiatric sanatoriums, the former with a comic touch, the latter in a darker tone. Hale’s prose is elegant without calling attention to itself, like the well-cut dresses one is sure her female characters wear. There’s a slight slackening in some of the later stories, but not in “Rich People” (1960), a marvelously complex examination of a woman’s seething ambivalence about her “high thinking and plain living” family and herself that closes with the anguished question, “Where is my life?”
Classic examples of the art of short fiction, capturing the variety of human experience with sophisticated economy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59853-642-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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