Heartbreakers from a writer who knows how to do it right.
Gifted novelist and essayist Boswell (The Half-Known World, 2007, etc.) lets it all hang out in 13 unpredictable short stories.
The collection opens with the showy “No River Wide,” which confoundingly juxtaposes the lives of a woman in two places at once. Many of the stories focus on formative periods. In “Smoke,” for example, a trio of adolescents boast about sex but keep their secrets, while “Supreme Beings” depicts a troubled 20-year-old convinced that Jesus Christ is hiding out in his town. A few pieces, like “City Bus,” are mere sketches instead of full-fledged portraits, but more often, the stories run deep. The best of them lean to the dark side, bordering on crime fiction tinged with a beat-influenced incongruity. “A Walk in Winter” is particularly tense, as a young man visits the country with a rural sheriff to find out whether the ruined corpse found nearby is his long-disappeared mother. The deeply uncomfortable title story follows a drifter named Keen during a summer of mushrooms and transgressions in a borrowed house with his amigos. Naturally, his bad mojo gets the best of him. Dealing with low lives, Boswell never abandons his insight or his storytelling verve, both on full display in “Lacunae.” Its protagonist, a divorced man who has lost his way in the world, contemplates fatherhood in its many forms. “Hearts can swell,” he thinks. “One’s father may speak the truth even as he settles into death. One’s mother may see in a coincidence the opportunity for redemption. One’s own child may have the blood and genes of another man. Reason may live in things that are not rational.” Few like what they see on the unwelcome voyages of self-discovery delineated here.
Heartbreakers from a writer who knows how to do it right.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55597-524-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
A first collection of ten thematically linked stories, each of which deals with Britain's experience of France, from a sophisticated observer of both countries. Barnes's Francophilia has previously found expression in such novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1985) and Talking It Over (1991). The stories range widely, from a hauntingly dramatic tale of the persecution of a 17th-century village's forbidden religious practices ("Dragons") to a discursive medley of memories (in "Tunnel") indulged during a train ride to Paris in the year 2015 by the elderly English writer to whom we've been listening for longer than we'd suspected. The latter piece demonstrates the signal weaknesses of Barnes's fiction: a tendency to overload frail narrative situations with extravagant quantities of specific information (in this case, about the history, commerce, literature, viticulture, and Lord knows what-an-else of la belle France), and a self-conscious density of aper‡u and epigram so oppressive that the book fairly grows heavy in your hands. Such ostentation reduces to trivia a promising tale ("Experiment") about a stuffy Englishman's "undeserved entr‚e to the Surrealist circle" and a snappish satire on literary conferences ("Gnossienne")—and, conversely, swells to shapelessness the narrative of a cricketer whose visits to France climax in the unhappy year of 1789 ("Melon") and an otherwise strongly imagined and beautifully structured story ("Junction") about the building of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway. The better stories—often very good indeed—include a wry account of two unmarried English ladies relocated in the French countryside and struggling to operate a vineyard ("Hermitage"); a compassionate (though overextended) portrayal of a lonely Jewish woman who mourns for many decades afterward the death of her brother on the Somme battlefields ("Evermore"); and the superbly witty "Interference," which describes with delicious comic detail the final days of a vain and waspish English composer in the adopted country that good-naturedly attempts to tolerate him. A very uneven display of this very skillful author's obvious talents.
Pub Date: March 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44691-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
A powerful debut collection of eight stories (two previously published in Story magazine) that are linked thematically: They're all about man and dog, though not in any sappy sense, and with no cute anthropomorphizing. In ``Bill,'' an octogenarian feels closer to her dying poodle than to her own family, and cooks up a grand feast the night before he's put to sleep; in ``Agnes of Bob,'' a childless widow realizes that her husband cared more about his dog, Bob, than about her, and the dog's presence reminds her of the emptiness in her marriage; in ``A Blessing,'' a pregnant woman is disabused of any cute notions about dogs when a trip to the country to buy one ends with an act of brutality. No sentimentality mars these gritty narratives. ``The Wake'' is a wildly implausible piece about a bachelor whose ex- girlfriend returns to him in a box via UPS. He's more concerned with the dead dog now rotting under his house than with her, his obsession offering a deliberately unsubtle correlative to a failed relationship. ``Seeing Eye,'' a vignette about a dog working for a blind man, compares its present life of responsibility to its former life roaming free on a farm. The full resonance of one of Watson's dominant themes (men-as-dogs, elemental in their needs, faithless in their couplings) emerges in the three best stories. ``The Retreat'' finds a few soon-to-be divorced men hiding out in the country, drinking, hunting, sloughing off responsibility. ``Kindred Spirits'' layers the metaphorical relationships in its story-within-a-story about a dog tracking a wild boar in the Florida swamp. The tale turns into a not very subtle parallel to the narrator's present cuckolding by his business partner. The title piece is an elegy to a dog-like life of wildness, freedom, animalism no longer available to men. Watson's muscular prose stands shoulder to shoulder with the best cracker realists, from Faulkner to Larry Brown. (Regional author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03926-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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