With his third collection of stories, Carver has securely hit his stride; his stories seem like no one else's. What they do seem like more and more, in fact, are poems—written in a fiat, Far Western contemporary American style, blankly uninflected for long stretches until a metaphor is slipped around to make a tight cinch at the end. The title story—understandably much-anthologized by now—is perhaps the grandest of these. But equally impressive are: "Chef's House," about a failed marital idyll, with a terrifying but always oblique portrait of a man just about to fall off the wagon; "Vitamins"—an intricate, open-ended story of infidelity, menace, the rawness of daily life; and "Fever," an uncharacteristic story (conventionally upholstered, softly written) in which a man is deserted by his wife and left with two small children—yet somehow is able to reconcile himself to life, with help from an elderly housekeeper of infinite benevolence. Elsewhere, however, Carver's tendency toward the pathetic and the sentimental upsets the delicate balance in his work: "Feathers," a wonderful sketch of a low-rent dinner party (the TV left on, the nuts left in the can, a peacock, a remarkably ugly baby), ends with a shabby piece of narrative comeuppance; "A Small Good Thing," expanded from the last collection, now suffers from a moony conclusion stressing peace and oasis; "Where I'm Calling From" is a wildly sentimental story about a drying-out farm—in sharp contrast to the fine, anti-sentimental studies of alcoholism in "Chef" and "Careful." And when Carver stacks the deck this way, you read with interest but feel a little cheated, reactions elicited by the mix of anesthetized style and heavy, soppy metaphor. Still, when he plays it straight, as in "Cathedral," this storyteller works us magically into that supreme fictional zone of intimacy and surprise—making his third collection, despite its frequent wobbles, a distinguished, powerful book from a very special writer.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1983
ISBN: 0679723692
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
``I coulda married Joe Morgan, who owns three Tastee Freezes,'' a wife tells her husband—not unkindly—in Hoffman's third collection (after By Land, By Sea, 1988). It's just this sort of low ambition that runs like a fault line through these competent but commonplace stories. ``Home'' is the mid-South, by turns genteel, grotesque and seedy. Hoffman's range is broad, but the track is well worn: Feisty widows drink ``tonic'' and bemoan their faded beauty; horses are noble and bird dogs soft of mouth; great-great-grandaddy was a Confederate colonel and a US senator. At their best, these stories relate with great tenderness the small kindnesses people share: Celeste, the black maid in ``Coals,'' antagonizes but ultimately comforts her grieving white employer; the retired and embittered preacher in ``Sweet Armageddon'' prays for doomsday but is solicitous toward his wife, regretful of the poverty to which his principled stubbornness has reduced them. At their worst, the pre-fab familiarity of character and situation dulls the intended effect. ``Abide With Me,'' meant to be a raucous tall tale about a man who sees God and raises a statue in tribute, degenerates instead into a catalogue of tired bumpkin caricatures and cute southern colloquialisms. Like the anglophile fox hunter in ``Points,'' for whom the chase is ``choosing to reach back into the best epochs the centuries had to offer, as well as a statement of where one stood in respect to a world becoming increasingly common, disordered, and hateful,'' many of these characters—aging, fighting irrelevance, confronted with evidence of their own deterioration as well as that of society—seek refuge from the inhospitable present in the past. In the best southern literary tradition, they are more often haunted than comforted by their heritage. Well-crafted, but oh so familiar.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8071-1835-4
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
An entertaining and occasionally dazzling first collection from Kincaid, the Florida-born author of the novel Crossing Blood (1992). With a single exception, these eight stories focus on girls or women who can't make sense out of their relationships with men or with their own addled and demanding emotions. And even that exception, ``Why Richard Can't,'' looks sympathetically at a middle-aged English professor's unwillingness to change or to leave the wife he's comfortable with for the woman student whose mind and body alike excite his interest. Too many of Kincaid's characters, in fact, talk away at us from conditions of frustrating stasis: the girl who can't make her inattentive, straying father notice her (in ``Pretty Please''), or the twice-married woman who knows she'll fail again if she takes the lover she's considering (in the smartly titled ``Total Recoil''). The good news is that Kincaid's women are expert nonstop talkers, vernacular virtuosi who can make you howl with a deftly placed one-liner (``I don't have anything against boys from reform school''), or sit bolt upright upon hearing a forthright woman's description of the guilt felt by an unfaithful husband (``like his penis was the arrow on a compass and he suddenly remembered it was always supposed to be pointing north''). And two of the stories are flat-out wonderful. ``Just Because They've Got Papers Doesn't Mean They Aren't Still Dogs'' traces with wry compassion the education in female solidarity and self- knowledge that expands the horizons and strengthens the character of a childless small-town football coach's wife. And the moving title piece portrays, without a shred of sentimentality, the sexual and intellectual awakening of a young wife and mother who learns she's dying of cancer, and scorns to go gently into anybody's good night. Good, gritty work from a vigorous talent. Kincaid may well blossom into one of the better storytellers around.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 1-56512-177-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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