There may be more important writers around, but none is more likable, or more dependably entertaining and rewarding, than...
Readers who loved such a roomy, generously plotted, and detailed novel the Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls (2001) won’t be able to resist this first collection of seven stories by the Maine novelist.
Most of the stories are closely akin to Russo’s longer fiction, especially “The Farther You Go,” which shows a slightly harsher side of hangdog college prof Hank Devereaux, the engaging protagonist of Straight Man (1997)—from which it is perhaps a discarded chapter? Crises peculiar to middle age and bereavement are compassionately explored in tales about a widowed filmmaker’s tardy realization of what his late wife had meant to him (“Monhegan Light”); and a retired academic biographer’s disturbingly personal discovery that it is “foolish and arrogant to think you could imagine the truth of another human life” (“Buoyancy”). Russo is at his best in the beautifully developed title story, in which a nun’s accidental grasp of the truth about her childhood functions as epiphany also for her divorced creative-writing teacher. And he’s unrivaled by any writer since the early Salinger at striking to the heart of childhood-becoming-adolescence: in the novella-length history of an introspective ten-year-old (“The Mysteries of Linwood Hart”) slowly, painstakingly maturing out of his suspicion that the world revolves around him; and in the superb “Joy Ride.” The latter records the experiences and observations of a preadolescent embryonic delinquent whose impulsive mother snatches him away from deeper trouble, their Maine hometown, and her eccentric underachiever of a husband, for a brief, perilous vacation from domesticity and responsibility. It’s a wonderful distillation of Russo’s gifts for crystal-clear narration, subtle character portrayal, and irrepressible humor, and is capped by a tonally perfect bittersweet conclusion.
There may be more important writers around, but none is more likable, or more dependably entertaining and rewarding, than Russo.Pub Date: July 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41168-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Characters seldom transcend their class, race, or gender in a pretentious collection of six stories and a novella, winner of Pushcart's 14th annual Editors' Book Award, by Trinity College (Conn.) English professor Pfeil. Politics is mostly gesture in these jargony tales of disappointment and unrealized desire. Lost innocence seems to be the point of ``A Buffalo, New York Story,'' the narrator's lament over the Cold War values he wholeheartedly embraced in his middle- class youth: Quotations from Life magazine provide the historical context to this tale of left-liberal guilt. Race is at the center of the pointless ``Gator,'' a reminiscence of the narrator's short friendship with a black man during his own hippie years; his present-day success as a Stanford MBA of course explains his implicit racism. Male sexual (hetero) guilt underpins ``Dirty Pieces,'' a typically puritanical bit of leftish angst over masturbation, horniness, and lustful thoughts about women. The link between politics and sex is further explored in ``The Angel of Dad,'' the story of Max the Rad, an aging (and unintentional) caricature of a New Leftover who decides to change his life when his father's ghost visits him. The joyful innocence of teens who spontaneously rediscover do-wop singing is undercut by their commercial exploitation—a TV ad that becomes their 15 minutes. The Ann Beattieish novella, ``Almost Like Falling,'' captures the sad lives of some '60s types who realize, in the '80s, that their lives are going nowhere, Reagan being partly to blame for their working- class miseries. ``Freeway Bypass'' is the most explicit political piece here, with supporting quotations from Marx and Fredric Jameson: It's a collage of voices—anarchists who deface billboards; an old-timer disgusted by their vandalism; a billboard- space salesman; and a South American refugee who survives for days on a highway divider after being hit by a car. Humorless tales, in all, from a tenured radical.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-916366-49-9
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
A brilliant first collection of stories—many set in the historical past, and all concerning varieties of scientific pursuit and discovery—by the author of such well-received novels as The Middle Kingdom (1991) and The Forms of Water (1993). Barrett begins with a stunner: ``The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,'' about an unfulfilled faculty wife, her family's heritage of violence, and a telling incident in the life of the plant geneticist Gregor Mendel that impinged on the family's life and continues to cast long shadows over the woman's own psyche and marriage. The other six stories, all distinguished by a thoughtfully meditative tone and a firm focus on characters eager to analyze and understand their own natures, are almost uniformly rich and suggestive. ``Rare Bird'' describes the furtive rebellion of a gifted woman who, refusing to defer to her stolid brother's inferior intelligence, ingeniously escapes his—and their century's (the eighteenth's)—domination of women. ``Soroche'' relates a woman's progress through marriage, loss of husband and security, and toward fulfillment—ironically compared with the sad misadventures of ``Jemmy Button,'' the Tierra del Fuegan Indian uprooted from his culture and all but destroyed: It's a beautifully conceived tale, filled with mysterious grace notes and resonances. ``Birds with No Feet'' recounts the burning away of a young zoologist's illusions when he finds in Darwin's theory of evolution a mocking, yet strangely comforting explanation of his own character and fortunes. And the title novella, about a young Canadian doctor's existential adventure ministering to typhus- stricken Irish immigrants, re-creates with astonishing conviction a vanished time and place, and memorably examines both the despair and the moral courage of people who believe they can do no more, and no less, than, simply, what is right. Marvelous stories, unlike any being written today, by a writer whose continuing growth may well be one of the most interesting literary developments of the '90s.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03853-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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