A manically careening debut collection from Davies, the lead singer and songwriter for the 1960s band The Kinks and author of his 'unauthorized' autobiography, X-Ray (1995). Davies devotes the first half of the volume to his apparent doppelgÑnger, the former British pop/rock icon and current has- been Les Mulligan, and Mulligan’s nebbish of an agent, Richard Tennent. Impoverished and always near mental breakdown, Mulligan resists attempts by Tennent and others to revive his career and instead 'confront[s] the demons' by panhandling in public parks and undertaking other misadventures that presume to paint the tortured soul of an insecure true artist. With a confused structure and lines like 'He turned to another lyric. Or was it a new chapter in his life?,' this first section seems a mixed-up, unfinished mess. What follows, however, appears to have unaccountably sprung from the mind of a seasoned and mature author, not the aging hipster who wrote the aforementioned. This series of vaguely connected pieces includes the charming “Mr. Pleasant,” in which a dandy accountant at the end of his career briefly considers a dalliance with a dominatrix for hire, discovers his inability to empathize, and, as do many characters here, reconciles himself with the Faustian bargains he’s made. Muriel, a silent vagrant who passed briefly through the narrative of Les Mulligan, is awarded a magical account of her own, 'Voices in the Dark,' in which she serves as the mute therapist who hears everyone and judges no one. In 'Return to Waterloo,' the final'and finest'entry, Davies writes a gem of a character study. Frightening and funny, it portrays the quiet, seething rage and misogyny of a serial rapist who just wants some respect. When Davies abandons the embarrassing navel-gazing of a musician gone stale, he creates storytelling as surprising and unique as the song lyrics he wrote decades ago.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-6535-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991; Fiskadoro, 1985 etc.) brings together eleven down-and-out stories linked by their disagreeable narrator—a lowlife of mythic proportions who abuses drugs, booze, and people with reckless indifference. But this eventually recovering slacker reveals in these deceptively thin tales a psyche so tormented and complex that we allow him his bleak redemption. Gobbling whatever drugs he can, the nameless narrator witnesses a fatal car wreck while hitchhiking and experiences a strange euphoria. His highs can be sharp, edgy, and intense, resulting in casual violence and emotional disconnectedness (``Dundun''); or sluggish, as he threatens to nod out before our eyes. At a local gin mill (``Out on Bail'') with his fellow losers, he ponders arbitrary fate among those who fancy themselves ``tragic'' and ``helpless.'' After shooting heroin with his girlfriend at a Holiday Inn, he finds his ``mother'' in an angelic barmaid (``Work''). There's plenty of drug-induced surrealism as well: a stranger, feigning muteness, hitches a ride (``Two Men''); a man walks into an emergency room with a knife stuck in his eye (``Emergency''); and a cruising salesman from Ohio pretends to be a Polish immigrant (``The Other Man''). In ``Dirty Wedding,'' the same narrator proves his cowardice and contemptibility while waiting for his girlfriend at an abortion clinic. ``Steady Hands at Seattle General'' transcribes a loopy, poetic dialogue in a detox ward, where the narrator meets someone more jaded and bruised than himself. In recovery, he works part-time at a Phoenix home for the old and hopeless—some so deformed ``they made God look like a senseless maniac.'' While there, he dates a dwarf, takes his Antabuse, and begins peeping on a Mennonite couple who live by his bus stop. All this to remind us that God shows up in all the wrong places, and angels are everywhere. Blunt and gritty: Johnson's beautifully damned stories sing with divine poetry, all the while bludgeoning us with existential reality.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17892-5
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short preface by Philip Young explains the raison d'etre of this presentation of the Nick Adams stories which here are arranged chronologically and therefore provide a continuity — from child to adolescent to soldier to writer — and reveal the character developmentally. There are eight new stories constituting 40% of the book and extending its interest as unpublished rather than merely republished Hemingway.
Pub Date: April 17, 1972
ISBN: 0684169401
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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