In his fifth story collection, Bausch (In The Night Season, 1998, etc.) delightfully proves himself the chronicler of faults—not wrongs, but the shy, ambiguous, and sometimes disastrous ways we don’y quite get each other. This strong gathering (many of the peices were published earlier in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Esquire, and elsewhere) limns characters who are usually certain there is a different, often better person within themselves trying to emerge through the obstacles of conversation, idle chatter, TV’s white noise. A brush with violence (a schoolbus accident in “Valor”; a traffic jam shooting in “Two Altercations”) is usually required to reveal the longings of this self, concealed behind habit, routine, and drab domestic fatigue. “Valor” shows a man mired in a slowly decaying marriage who acquires new vigor by saving the lives of children; he gains a vision of himself he can admire, but his wife is indifferent to it. The dislocations here are often psychological. In “Riches,” a lottery winner’s sudden wealth entraps him in a new identity that gives him a way to be himself. “Nobody in Hollywood,” a story about the triumph of longing over truth, a young man’s wife is profoundly changed by a pair of encounters with a woman whose cryptic personality lures away his brother and his own wife. From such inflicted cleavings, guilt, expectation, and insecurity waft up like a gas, and Bausch masterfully evokes their acrid residue, often with just a few phrases. Nobody has anybody else straight here—or, put differently in “Someone to Watch Over Me,” an older man can’t see his youthful wife as she sees herself and vice versa, which makes the bright spangle of happiness a capricious, happenstance joy. Short fiction is widely regarded as Bausch’s strongest genre, and this engaging collection can only fortify that impression.
Pub Date: June 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-017333-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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