Hijuelos's fluency—whether seamlessly singing the sad ballad of a family harrowed by madness and displacement in his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1985), or the slightly happier, warmer, more infectious up-tempo one of the Pulitzer-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)—is his signature, and here he gives it a very, very long solo in a family chronicle that follows a huge Irish-Cuban family across the span of a century. The very title here speaks of muchness, and muchness is delivered—but much, disappointingly, about very little. The eponymous brother is a 1950's B-movie actor who hits the rocks, a pattern of modest success without hope of permanence that began with his Irish-born photographer father and Cuban poetess mother. The Montez O'Briens grow up in a small Pennsylvania town, and Hijuelos follows them out and back—to Cuba, New York, Hollywood, Alaska, Ireland—as they make do individually and together. But as often imperils such a feckless, loose-woven, overly charactered book, Hijuelos pretty quickly gives up trying to invest each sibling with the same detailed attention, focusing instead on the patrician eldest sister, Margarita—a woman of innate dignity and poise—and leaving the rest to serve as mere counterpoints. What Hijuelos seems to want to do more intently is write lyrically, and he does. Sometimes it's good lyricism—as in Mambo Kings, Hijuelos writes about sex with just the right amount of dirty relish and melody—and sometimes it's awful, plunging to the novice level: ``In his sisters' company, he'd experience a sensation of pure happiness and it would seem that everything around them emanated from those females, the world itself a fertile living thing, the earth beneath them humming with its unseen life....'' A family chronicle can manage to achieve both harmony and individuality- -Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall is an example—but it takes a concentration of imagination that Hijuelos hasn't engaged here. Fat but flat.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-15815-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ursula K. Le Guin would approve. An effective, memorable tale.
A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups.
We’re not entirely sure why it is that an unnamed man and his unnamed daughter are an endangered species, but we do know, after the man dies, that the animals call her “the last one.” Before his demise, the man teaches his daughter how to hunt, make snowshoes and arrows, comprehend the ways of the trees and the seasons in their mountain stronghold; they read “poetry from poets with strange names like Homer and Virgil, Hilda Doolittle and Wendell Berry, poems about gods and men and the wars between them, the beauty of small things, and peace,” and they talk night and day about the things that matter. Krivak (The Signal Flame, 2017, etc.) delivers no small amount of poetry himself in what might have been a cloying exercise in anthropomorphism, for once the preteen daughter is alone, a noble-minded bear takes care of her, avoiding “the place of the walls” where humans once dwelled in favor of alpine lakes and, in winter, a remote cave. A puma joins in the adventure to provide food while the bear sleeps, assuring her that she will become part of a story “for the forest to remember for as long as there is forest beneath the sun.” Part of the girl’s task is to bury her father on the distant mountaintop next to her mother’s grave, then, as the years pass, to honor them, “a girl no longer, though forever their child.“ A literary rejoinder of sorts to Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), Krivak’s slender story assures us that even without humans, the world will endure: The bears and mountain lions will come into their own in a world of buckled roofs and “ruined books,” and they themselves will tell stories under the light of the Great Bear. That’s small comfort to some humans, no doubt, but it makes for a splendid thought exercise and a lovely fable-cum-novel.
Ursula K. Le Guin would approve. An effective, memorable tale.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-942658-70-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
