It's a mess (the concluding episode is especially disjointed and truncated), but Grandmother's sensual energies and fluent...
Another inveterate yarnspinner dominates this chaotically structured yet frequently entertaining third novel (Blessed Is the Fruit, 1997, etc.) from American-born Antoni, who grew up in the Bahamas.
The place is the village of Chaguarameras on the island of Corpus Christi, and the storyteller is the (unnamed) eponymous Grandmother, a 96-year-old powerhouse who regales her young grandson Johnny with lavish extended tales of her commercial (and, coincidentally, heavily sexual) adventures. Most of them occurred during WWII, when American soldiers were stationed on Corpus Christi, the whorehouse trade thrived, and Grandmother matched wits with two importunate adversaries and admirers: a self-styled "King" (of a traveling carnival) who tried to dupe her into financing the search for a sunken pirate ship laden with treasure, and a white-suited Kentucky "Colonel" who helped her build a fast-food pizza enterprise, then later marketed Grandmother herself—as calypso singer "Lady Lobo." Neither of them is quite what he seems, and there's a similar abundance of unreality in Grandmother's hair-raising stories about a prowling "tiger that liked to eat cheese," a gorgeous seductress who murders and mutilates her lovers, an adopted girl and a "slaveboy" who shape-shift respectively into an iguana and an anaconda (the novel’s best sequence), and even a story set in "the old old time" of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Spanish conquistadors (which Grandmother claims to remember clearly). All this is more than a bit oppressively lush, but this time out Antoni reins in the Caribbean patois, and offers several delicious contrasts between the islanders' uninhibited carnality and American sexual timidity ("where . . . [the U.S. soldiers] came from, it was against the law even to play with yourself before the age of twenty-one").
It's a mess (the concluding episode is especially disjointed and truncated), but Grandmother's sensual energies and fluent loquacity make this Antoni's most accessible and enjoyable fiction nevertheless.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1687-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
A strong debut collection of eight stark stories about decent, ordinary people getting on with life in the Pacific Northwest. Starting with the beginning piece, “Settled on the Cranberry Coast,— in which a paunchy, retired teacher turned carpenter lands his first job rebuilding the house of a woman he had a major high-school crush on years ago—a house she now shares with her granddaughter—the themes of dysfunctional, distended families and scarcely nameable yearnings come to the fore. While middle age is often a focus, younger men alone also figure prominently. In “In Spain, One Thousand and Three,” a computer-game designer, recently widowed, manifests distress in the form of lusty thoughts about every female he comes in contact with—including his dead wife’s mother; in “Wizard,” a budding playwright’s debut, a romantic tale about Thomas Edison’s much younger first wife, opens a door into his fantasy life that the actress in the role willingly steps through. The most sustained story here, “A Fair Trade,” while having almost no men in it, still links thematically with the rest. Young Andie goes to live with her aunt Maggie on the rustic edge of Seattle after her father is killed in action in WWII. Wary of men, Maggie instills in her niece a love of independence, even though she falters by getting involved with someone who becomes more than merely possessive regarding Andie, forcing them to move. Andie grows up and out of touch with Maggie, marries, divorces, moves east, then returns to Seattle in her 50s a fully independent professional believing herself cut from the same cloth as her aunt—only to find Maggie’s life not what it seemed. The sensitivity to simple human drama is acute in all of these stories, and rather than being ruined by a certain sameness, they offer steady reassurance that quiet determination can make a difference.
Pub Date: April 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-89170-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Nine varied, lively, and beguiling stories from the ever-improving author of, most recently, Carolina Moon (1996). If you still think southern fiction is all about decaying antebellum mansions, miscegenation, and disturbing family secrets, you owe it to yourself to read McCorkle. Not that she shuns such matters—it’s just that her amiably unstrung characters keep reminding us that, even while psyches and marriages are collapsing, dishes pile up in the sink, and sometimes dirty laundry is, well, just clothes that have to be washed and hung on the line. She’s wonderful with beleaguered or comically resourceful women: a pregnant one trying to quit smoking and shape up generally (“Life Prerecorded”); an entrepreneur who markets funerals for “the soon-to-be deceased” (“It’s a Funeral! RSVP”); and, most memorably, a single mother obsessed with her own and her young son’s vulnerability (“A Blinking, Spinning, Breathtaking World”). If McCorkle stumbles with a monologue addressed by a man’s mistress to his wife (“Your Husband Is Cheating On Us”), suggesting the two murder him together, she shines when widening her lens to examine (“Paradise”) the seriocomic chemistry between a New York Jew (Adam) and an Atlanta fashion designer (Eve) hung up on “the North-South thing,” or a young clergyman’s uncertain ministry (“The Anatomy of Man”). She has a deadly eye for endearingly ludicrous detail (weddings and funerals bring out her best), a genius for piquant first-person narration, and a finely tuned ear for the accents of exasperated domesticity (“If Jesus were here he would take that child outside and wear his butt out”). Her stories meander even when they’re comparatively tightly plotted—but it’s always a pleasure staying with them just to hear her people rattle on. The work of an accomplished comic writer who’s continually refining her skills and expanding her range. McCorkle is gradually becoming our contemporary Eudora Welty.
Pub Date: June 2, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-204-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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