A first collection from Turchi (The Girls Next Door, 1989): 11 stories written in a mock-Hemingway prose—often too stilted for the subtle emotions he hopes to evoke—about sad sacks, ordinary lives in crisis, served up with huge dollops of minimalism. In the title piece, Tracy, a waitress and would-be actress, dates Walter, a much older man with a magic trick or two up his sleeve: ``Walter was a place she had to leave.'' It takes her far too long to do so, however, for she ``wondered how she was going to give their relationship a final scene.'' Turchi seems to believe in ambiguous endings—endings that here, anyway, mostly suggest the stories are maybe two thirds evolved, raw experience and good ideas not yet fashioned into art. In ``Alligator,'' for instance, teenager Blair is on the road with brother Bill and her parents. When the family spends the night with old friends (who aren't exactly friends anymore), the adults drink and chatter Raymond Carver-style while Blair thinks her ordinary thoughts and finally has a drink herself. ``Everything I Need,'' though, is promising: Cory's sad-sack life is juxtaposed to a radio talk show he becomes nearly addicted to, but the fiction tries to dovetail a hit-and-run radio story with Cory's own hit-and-run, whereupon he calls the talk show to confess. Finally, the piece tries for too much and loses credibility. Of the rest: ``The Kitchen'' is amusing (a waiter, a college dropout, gets the plot of Moby Dick confused with his restaurant job), and in ``Layover,'' by contrast, a middle-aged man whose daughter is getting married decides his life is over and sits forever in an airport hotel room. One darn thing after another in short newspaperese paragraphs: the effect is largely monotonous or gimmicky.
Pub Date: May 28, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-24996-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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