Simple prose goes far in exploring complicated lives.
Filmmaker Miller debuts with seven spare, elegant stories delineating the haphazard choices that influence women’s journeys through life.
Daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath, the author obviously knows well the various cloistered social worlds of New York City and its rural environs whose occasional collisions she deftly portrays. The eponymous protagonist of “Louisa” (each tale is named after its heroine) watches her mother earn dubious fame as a naif artist, creating ceramics so bizarre that bohemian Manhattanites embrace the Dutchess County native with the kind of regard offered a lame pet. When Louisa grows up she becomes a painter, entangled in one affair after another, always searching for the excitement new love brings. In the troubling “Nancy,” the neglected only daughter of Manhattan socialites goes to great lengths to gain a little attention: pretending to drown at the country club swimming pool, making gruesome drawings for her nanny, a college student of child development. “Julianne” shows a woman coming to terms with being the wife of a great man. Joe, a famous writer and many years her senior, seemed a wonderful choice as a husband for a budding poet. But now the 41-year-old mother of a little girl has scant time for poetry and realizes at a dinner party filled with Joe’s intellectual buddies that she is no longer a writer herself, simply the hostess. In “Paula,” a woman being walked to her car by a man she just met in a club narrowly misses being hit by a passing vehicle, a speeder that kills her companion. Over the next few hours, the shell-shocked Paula picks up a hitchhiker who turns out to be an abuse victim, tells her mother she’s pregnant but will abort, and tentatively reconciles with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. This uneven tale of luck and fate closes the collection.
Simple prose goes far in exploring complicated lives.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1699-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
