A new talent in need of some honing.
Debut collection delineating the tribulations of boyhood, and how they define a man.
Set in Wisconsin, these ten stories feature an upper-Midwestern landscape’s deep snow drifts, acres of farmland and encroaching suburbs, which play a defining role in the characters’ lives. “Puberty” shows an adolescent finding both sexual enlightenment and retributive justice in a strategically planted climbing tree. In “Black Earth, Early Winter Morning,” a 16-year-old boy must reconsider all the advice his older cousin has given him about the value of country living when a tower of improperly stacked hay bales falls on his mentor. Dan Oxford, protagonist of “The Future, the Future, the Future,” has a wife, a good job, a child on the way and a 30-year mortgage locked in at a good rate; now that he’s achieved all the goals he set for himself in college, he decides to mark his accomplishment by skiing an expert slope he can’t handle. The collection features many action scenes, most of them well-written: a boy with his hands in his pockets cannot save himself from a disfiguring fall (“So Long, Anyway”); a drowning student disrupts a swimming class (“Crow Moon”); a widower on an emotional rampage caroms down a ski slope on a stolen sled (“The Cold War”). But sometimes the author pushes action to comic-book extremes, as in “English Cousin,” which shows a bully goading a boy to climb down a chimney and surprise two lovers (he gets stuck), or “Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow,” narrated by a snack-food specialist who attends a convention in San Francisco, where a homeless man teaches him a killing maneuver. The most powerful stories here are more quietly observed. “The Train” is a vignette about a group of boys who visit an abandoned granary at midnight on Halloween. “The Whales” features the same characters walking at night to a park by a lonesome county highway.
A new talent in need of some honing.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-27535-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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