And uneven and mismatched gathering. The best here remind us of the author’s crisp mastery of the form.
A workmanlike collection (his fifth, after Borrowed Hearts, 1999) from DeMarinis, author of eight novels.
The volume has three sections, the first and strongest consisting of seven takes on one man. In 1962, Moss is in college on the GI bill, trying to make his depressed wife Corliss happy and waiting for work with a Seattle defense contractor. When he and two buddies break into the physics lab at night to finish an experiment, they’re radiated by high-velocity neutrons from an accelerator. Years later, Moss concludes that “Sometimes the worst doesn’t happen.” In “The Bear Itself,” Moss and Astrid, his buddy Roddy’s wife, save another friend from drowning. Roddy screams at Astrid, “Will you please put on some clothes, you goddamned whore!” With typical DeMarinis pithiness, Moss observes, “If a handful of words can end a marriage, Roddy had found them.” “The Missile Gypsies” finds Moss, Corliss, and their baby son, Teller, transferred to North Dakota, where Moss collects data on the Minuteman missiles and betrays Corliss. In “Structure,” Moss is desperate because Corliss has left him and he fears he has prostate cancer. He has another affair and loses his job. “Freaks” is the darkest, most conclusive story. Just as the now-13-year-old Teller is called a “freak” by cheerleaders, Moss develops weird symptoms (double vision, impotence, lactating breasts). He has successful brain surgery, recovers, reconnects with his son. Less satisfying as a unit, the second section offers nine stories about men who are dead either through electrocution (“Handyman”), heart attack “atop the bimbo” (“The Life and Times of a Forty-nine-Pound Man”), a vicious animal on the desert (“Bête Noire”), the repercussions of going wild on an airplane (“Desperado”), or from beating a woman to death (“The Horse Dealer’s Lovers”). The last section—four rough-hewn coming-of-agers set in the ’40s and ’50s—could as well have been left out.
And uneven and mismatched gathering. The best here remind us of the author’s crisp mastery of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58322-637-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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