Funny, pleasurable and often prescient short fiction that delivers many more hits than misses.
A career-spanning compilation of fascinating short fiction and flash fiction from Grayson (And to Think that He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, 2006, etc.), ranging from his first published story (1975’s “Rampant Burping”) to fresh work.
Rooted in post-modernism, Grayson’s economical writing style abets a natural gift for storytelling, and his tales are imbued with a comic touch–whether darkly so, or merely playful. In one example of the former, a caustic protagonist in “Those Seventies Stories” pretends to be one of a pair of twin brothers whenever he frequents area diners in order to alternately abuse and sympathize with a dull yet harmless local. The immediately preceding “The Life of Katz,” on the other hand, seems to be little more than an exercise in enumerating a litany of dog- and cat-related puns and idioms. This kind of nonchalance usually plays to Grayson’s strengths, but sometimes his tendency toward self-indulgence gets the better of him. A few stories find the author employing tics to mark his fiction as quirky–“An Appropriated Story,” for instance, uses the copyright symbol as a scene break–or using formal subversion to oversell his point, as in “Unobtrusive Methods, Inchoate Designs,” whose narrator breaks the fourth wall to deliver a brief, meta-fictional address on the nature of reality and perception that only renders the story frivolous. At his best, though, Grayson deftly explores the dilemmas of suspended youth–specifically the ache of the lovelorn, the search for purpose and the tendency to cling desperately to the familiar. To many of his characters, this means remaining perpetually in academia, earning advanced degrees while struggling to choose career paths or endlessly returning to camp as counselors late into their 20s (“Life with Libby”). In “Albertson’s Pulls Out of New Orleans,” an Idaho transplant to the Deep South is almost unreasonably obsessed with a local branch of his hometown supermarket chain, to the point of ineptly transferring his affections for the brand onto one of its cashiers.
Funny, pleasurable and often prescient short fiction that delivers many more hits than misses.Pub Date: April 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-6152-0547-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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