Serving recommendation: One story per sitting. The book may be savored longer that way.
Rage in all its ugly glory takes center stage in this delectable debut collection.
The characters populating the landscape of these nine stories exist mostly in a rarefied life of the mind—scholars, teachers, reviewers, artists—until some crisis forces them to focus their powers of observation on themselves. In “An Excitable Woman,” an academic has no idea what to do about his spiteful mother, who lives only for the pleasure of rejecting the approaches of her “big-shot professor son.” The protagonist of “Samantha,” a black student full of a “surging, corrosive indignation,” is spoiling for a fight with anyone at her predominantly white college—the audio-visual department assistant, a minority affairs counselor, the bookstore cashier—until a brief encounter with a professor yields some surprises, not least of which is her own response. A music aficionado, awed by a fellow audience member (“The Stranger”) who physically removes a whole row of disruptive teenagers from their seats at a Tanglewood concert, begins to stalk the man until he finds himself engaged in an even more violent act. In “The Visit,” an up-and-coming poetry critic meets Robert Lowell and his wife, Lady Caroline, in their trashed bedroom at the Gramercy Hotel in a set piece that is part Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, part “Beavis and Butthead.” In “Secrets and Sons,” a magazine editor and long-time friend to a dying poet is forced to come to terms with his competitive hatred for the poet’s uneducated gay ward when he is upstaged at the funeral by voluminous evidence that he knew only one small part of the man’s life. Boyers’s stories about academics and art-lovers who hide their more ignoble characteristics until life inevitably draws them out is exquisitely crafted and acutely observed.
Serving recommendation: One story per sitting. The book may be savored longer that way.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-885586-40-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
