Four stories and a novella, linked by their depictions of conflict, mostly racial, in a second collection from McKnight (after The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, 1992). There's nothing particularly distinctive about McKnight's storytelling, though he tries for affect with first-person narratives. Still, the voices here all sound alike, though two shorter pieces—``He Sleeps'' and ``Palm Wine''—do seem to be told by the same character. Both concern an African-American researcher in Senegal who's collecting proverbs for his dissertation in folklore. In the first, he finds himself dreaming fecund narratives that reflect both the sexual mess he left back home and the torrid lovemaking he overhears in the next room. His retellings, though, are deflated by his native guide, who reminds him that dreams mean only one thing—you're asleep. The narrator's increasing frustration with the Senegalese leads to a lot of bad vibes (and defeats any sense of Roots-y solidarity). In the latter story, his quest for the legendary native elixir leaves the teller where he began: queasy, suspicious, and angry. The slangier narrators of ``The More I Like Flies'' and ``Boot'' complain about life stateside. The first is told by a young black civil servant who works in the Air Force Academy kitchen and resents his co-workers for their lack of sympathy and, once, their racial commentaries. Race matters less in ``Boot,'' about hierarchical conflict in the military and the narrator's regret that he sided with a whiny complainer rather than with his D.I. The long title piece explores interracial life on an Air Force base in Louisiana, where a bootstraps-and-stern-minded African-American family moves next to a white family whose racial attitudes are far more confused than anyone realizes, including a legacy of miscegenation, lust, do- gooderism, and simple friendship, all coming out in twisted fashion. Cultural conflict and racial wounds: McKnight sounds few unusual notes in this competent if not compelling volume.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-4829-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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