A masterful assemblage of tales that illuminate life in a flagging American town.
In this linked short story collection, the inhabitants of a Pennsylvania steel town grapple with aging and the shifting rhythms of their community.
Ganaego is a typical mill town in Western Pennsylvania, where the steel jobs have disappeared and taken much of the rest of the local economy with them: “The closure of the steel plant had, to be sure, clobbered all of Ganaego—one more casualty in the hollowing out of America’s industrial heartland.” Even so, American lives roll on, much in the way that they always have. Maddy Schoolcraft, a divorced community college administrator and a woman whom nobody takes seriously, is convinced she is responsible for the car accident that killed one of her son’s high school classmates. As she copes with her guilt, she must also assist her aging, philosophical father, who is going blind. The obese and aging Max Fischman operates a jewelry and appliance shop in Ganaego’s failing commercial district. When his window is smashed in the middle of the night and his inventory stolen, the police chastise him for his broken security system, but Max already has an idea who might have committed the crime. Pleasance Stubbs is a schoolteacher in her mid-50s resisting her doctor’s orders to retire or face crippling damage to her hips while dealing with her long-furloughed husband’s insistence that they pay for the suit of a recently deceased millworker. The 12 stories span the period from 1971 to 2015, and characters from one tale will often pop up as minor players in another. As a cycle, they offer a series of windows into the small, domestic lives of the town’s inhabitants as things change—or don’t—in the fortunes of Ganaego.
McKean’s prose is measured yet probing, revealing the hidden theatricality of even the collection’s minor characters. Here, Maddy describes the movements of her father’s eye doctor: “Barking out his conclusions in acronyms to an assistant who typed his comments into a computer, the doctor would strap on a helmet with a light attached—much like, Maddy would think, what a spelunker might don before descending into a cave—and gaze through a scope into his patients’ eyes.” A melancholic specter haunts the collection, and yet the author largely resists the urge to dwell in nostalgia or sentimentality for the town’s bustling past. Instead, a quiet fatalism imbues each of these tales, in which the inevitable march from youth to old age and death is mirrored in the plights of each of his protagonists. The episodes McKean chronicles are mundane, and yet in them, he discovers the perennial American drama of hopefulness giving way slowly—and then all at once—to disappointment. Standout pieces include “Dance of the Little Swans,” about a woman with a failing dance studio; and “Death in the 5 and 10,” about a librarian who learns of the tragic death of a child. But nearly every story will succeed at striking something in readers’ hearts.
A masterful assemblage of tales that illuminate life in a flagging American town.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction.
This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissects Eat Pray Love and The Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance.
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063277052
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 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.
