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
Berry has employed all the forms he works in—poetry, the essay, fiction short and long—toward an examination of what it means to be placed: what here and elsewhere he calls ``membership''; American individualism-turned-loneliness seems like the nightmare that puts his eloquence to greatest use. Though only one of the five stories here, ``Making It Home''—a war veteran slowly walks his way out of horror toward his known identity, his own Kentucky landscape—describes it expressly, a cradling arc is the shape most fundamental to didactic art from Dante onward; in other stories as well, all set in the community of Port William (Remembering, 1988, etc.), often there is a rescue (such as that, in the title piece, of an old man from a degrading death-in-hospital) or an unnoticed support (``A Jonquil for Mary Penn'')—a floor beneath which one cannot drop. The negatives Berry creates as contrast material aren't done as well as the lightsome positives: a hapless Kentucky State Police detective investigating an abduction in ``Fidelity'' comes off as a straw man pelted by the Port William members with chalky stringencies. The members' inner darkness—such as the shame and desolation (uncamouflaged by urban noise) that the pathetic murderer/suicide in ``Pray Without Ceasing'' undergoes when faced with mercy—strikes more deeply. Ultimately, the prose of the stories less illustrates the Port William values—forgiveness, dignity, fidelity, community—than provides an indelible, sure- footed rhythm for them. Cadenced, eternal-seeming sentences everything; there is an enchantment to them. The last story—``Are You All Right?''—two neighbors going out at night to check on two others—feels almost like a dream whose template-like perfection you wake up shaken by: inevitable, simple, reaching. Uncommonly satisfying art and vision.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41633-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
A wonderfully affecting new collection of 12 stories by the Anglo-Irish master (Felicia's Journey, 1995, etc.), whose sympathetic portrayals of lonely, betrayed, and self-betraying people are unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. Though Trevor disdains to raise his voice, melodrama and tragedy alike are vividly present in his careful analyses of relationships unravelling, dangers that lurk beneath the mildest and most respectable of surfaces, lifelong dreams and painstaking plans that come to nothing. His plainspoken prose and scrupulous fairness to all of his characters betoken a modesty and restraint that throw into bold dramatic relief his unjudging (one almost wants to say courteous) examinations of people who surprise us with the range and depth of their often buried emotions. The best pieces in this collection—his eighth—are on a par with Trevor's finest ever. In "After Rain," for example, a thirtyish spinster (one uses such words when discussing Trevor), on the latest of her many vacation trips to Italy, observes a painting of the Annunciation and is stimulated by it to perceive how she has, all along, been the cause of her own romantic unhappiness. In "The Potato Dealer"—one of the few stories set in Ireland—an unwed pregnant girl, married off to a dull older man, cannot conceal the identity of her baby's father and finds that, though her confession pains and burdens her patient husband, both he and she can bear the disgrace. Both "A Friendship" and "Timothy's Birthday" describe quiet acts of rebellion that will have painful long-lasting consequences. In "Gilbert's Mother"—an amazing example of Trevor's celebrated grasp of abnormal psychology—a mother who realizes that her grown son is a rapist and murderer decides she must keep his secret ("Her role was only to accept: He had a screw loose, she had willed him to be born"). Dependably brilliant work from one of Chekhov's most accomplished disciples.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-87007-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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