An infuriatingly uneven second collection (after The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) whose chaotic feel and...
Bizarre content and rhetorical overkill are the salient features of this oddball gathering of 13 short fictions (some aren’t precisely stories), by the young author of Purple America (1997) and The Ice Storm (1994), among others.
Moody’s characters are casualties of various culture and gender wars, whose private battles are recounted in bursts of staccato sentence fragments ripe with the effluvia of psychic dislocation and sexual dysfunction, danced to a heavy thrum of rock music–backed antic despair. Scarcely developed premises mar several stories (“Hawaiian Night,” “Drawer,” “Boys”) that aren’t much more than, well, moody prose poems. Vagrant forms are employed by “Pan’s Fair Throng,” a faux (and rather arch) fantasy written to accompany a painter-friend’s exhibit; “Wilkie Ridgeway Fahnstock, The Boxed Set,” in which liner notes for an audiocassette package reveal the farcically wasted life of a poor little rich boy undone by “his countercultural personal habits”; and “Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13,” an annotated listing whose contents amusingly express the truculent daydreams and hang-ups of a sardonic woman book dealer (one longs for a glimpse at that cookbook reputedly authored by J.D. Salinger). “The Double Zero” reimagines Sherwood Anderson’s classic tale of failed midwestern enterprise (“The Egg”); and the kindred spirits, if not influences of, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Rick De Marinis are observable in distaff portrayals of a feisty woman fed up with her smug Lacanian-intellectual lover (“Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal”) and a minor L.A. actress (who specializes in “well-paying but shallow roles in commercials”) caught up in teen-gang crossfire at a local McDonald’s (“Carousel”). Authentic emotion replaces arbitrary weirdness only in the opening and closing pieces, tragicomic farces spun from their possible deeply personal animating ideas: the death of a beloved sister, and how best to appropriately memorialize and honor it.
An infuriatingly uneven second collection (after The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) whose chaotic feel and flow prove both seductive and alienating. Moody marches on, to the beat of a drummer so different many readers may be unable to hear it at all.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-58874-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first collection of stories with great first lines, usually followed by fictions as light as air—some antic or absurd, others delicate or touching. The title piece is one of the best: a good-humored comedy about an Indiana girl out West, a sort of bounty hunter looking for cheerleaders in the mountains who've never been seen but ``were part of the mountain mythology.'' ``Better Be Ready 'Bout Half Past Eight'' is both hilarious and moving: `` `I'm changing sex,' Zach said.'' That first line starts off an absurd chain of events as seen through the eyes of Zach's best friend. Zach, who becomes Zoe, is finally forced to say, ``I think you're letting this come between us.'' Baker's tone, light but not frothy, is just right. But those two stories are the high points here; others are slick entertainments, albeit with sober undercurrents: ``The Spread of Peace'' (first line: ``If peace spreads, Heather may lose her job'') is about a weapons designer at the end of the cold war who's also faced with a lump in her breast; ``My Life in the Frozen North'' is a mock explorer-narrative told by a young woman, ``the child of explorers,'' who learns that ``The law of life in the Frozen North is Eat,'' and comes to realize, sadly, that her parents ``discovered nothing''; and ``Clearwater and Latissimus'' is the moving story of Siamese twins, told by a naive (and ``normal'') fellow student. Other pieces here are shapeless or cutesy, but the best are luminous with verbal play and intimations of how ordinary strangeness can be. (Some have appeared in Atlantic, the Best of the West, New Stories from the South and various lit mags.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8118-0324-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Four connected long stories from Le Guin (A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, 1994, etc.) featuring the planets Yeowe and Werel, the latter a slave-owning oligarchy, the former its colony. Contact by the wise, multi-planet space civilization, the Ekumen, lends impetus to revolutions on both worlds. The slaves of Yeowe oust their brutal Bosses after a savage seven-year struggle; later, the slaves of Werel rise up to topple their Owners. But on Yeowe the women discover that they have overthrown the Bosses only to be oppressed by their own menfolk; and so begins their slow but implacable fight for equality. In "Betrayals," the disgraced but enlightened revolutionary Abberkam finds redemption in his burgeoning love for the teacher Yoss. "Forgiveness Day" tells the tale of Solly, the Envoy of the Ekumen of Werel, who, at the beginning of the slaves' revolt, is kidnapped and imprisoned with punctilious but honorable soldier Teyeo, her bodyguard. Havzhiva of Hain, Solly's assistant, is "A Man of the People" who helps the women of Yeowe with their own nonviolent revolution. And "A Woman's liberation" is narrated by Radosse Rakam, born a slave on Werel, eventually to become instrumental in the women's revolution on Yeowe—and Havzhiva's beloved. Whether constructing a moving and expressive love story, or articulating the feminist subtext, there is no more elegant or discerning expositor than Le Guin.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 006076029X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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