At the intersection of Salinger, Ted Williams, and Ray Charles, the author returns to the neighborhoods of his maturation.
Portraits of the author as a young man, in short stories, from a writer celebrated for his music biographies and criticism.
In the opening author’s note, Guralnick quotes novelist Lee Smith: “I have always felt that I can tell the truth better in fiction than nonfiction.” This hints that his 11 stories illuminate emotional truth and depth of feeling more than autobiographical fact. Proceeding from coming-of-age awkwardness through middle-aged angst, they generally present a young white man who reads voraciously though he’s indifferent to school, develops an increasing affinity for music by Black artists before he has ever met any Black people, and is both wildly romantic and totally clueless toward women. The protagonists have different names in each story and attend a variety of colleges, but much remains the same: They’re generally set in Massachusetts in the 1950s and ’60s (Boston, Cambridge, a family-run summer camp) and the father is usually a doctor returning home after World War II. The mother has a hearing problem she does her best to hide. Divorces occur, as does an occasional flirtation with homoeroticism and heroin. There is depression and therapy. The boy has little notion where he wants to end up, but bookstores, baseball, and an increasingly bohemian social circle provide clues. The two longest stories are among the most ambitious: In “Forgiveness,” the protagonist has become a creative writing professor who embarrasses himself after falling for a student. In the closing “Franny and Zooey,” two precociously literary high school lovers reunite by chance after decades apart, renewing a relationship after both have achieved and suffered plenty. Throughout this collection, one senses an author trying to explore the roads not taken—as much for himself as for the reader.
At the intersection of Salinger, Ted Williams, and Ray Charles, the author returns to the neighborhoods of his maturation.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781567928518
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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