Oldshue writes a loose, relaxed prose, that of an unhurried natural storyteller with a wry affection for many of his...
The characters in this debut story collection confront minor crises and sudden shocks, the sort of narrative spectrum one might expect from an author who's also a medical doctor.
The elderly upstate New York couple hit by bad weather in the title story are also facing a neighborhood nearly emptied of its “first families,” a fact brought jarringly home when they crash into a car driven by one of the last (no one is hurt). Threats and loss recur in “Fergus B. Fergus” when a boy caring for a vacationing neighbor’s cats feels the “heart-pounding” terrors of a vacant house at night and then another sort of anxiety when one cat disappears on his watch. These two stories, which touch on people of the same rural New York community, and another concerning a troubled pregnancy and a Home Depot shopping trip, all bring to mind familiar Richard Russo territory. Oldshue also wields a dry humor that is especially effective in a story about an elderly woman disappearing from her nursing home. But Oldshue is better when he’s a bit unconventional. The psychiatrist in the long, meandering “Mass Mental” finds that a from-the-hip analysis for a couple he’s seeing may have caused the husband to murder his wife. An elderly Lithuanian relative whose wartime prison experience furnishes a project for a girl’s bat mitzvah offers an unusual angle on the Holocaust. A story about a gay male prostitute in 1978 and a confused married man ends with an unexplained death and a wife facing the new disease called AIDS.
Oldshue writes a loose, relaxed prose, that of an unhurried natural storyteller with a wry affection for many of his characters and a wide range of human interest.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60938-451-7
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
A literary tour de force of precariousness set in a blistering place, a state shaped like a gun.
In 11 electric short stories, the gifted Groff (Fates and Furies, 2015, etc.) unpacks the “dread and heat” of her home state.
In her first fiction since President Barack Obama named Fates and Furies his favorite book of the year, Groff collects her singing, stinging stories of foreboding and strangeness in the Sunshine State. Groff lives in Gainesville with a husband and two sons, and four of these tales are told from the perspectives of unmoored married mothers of young ones. The first, “Ghosts and Empties,” which appeared in the New Yorker, begins with the line, “I have somehow become a woman who yells,” a disposition the narrator tries to quell by walking at all hours as “the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums.” Groff fans will recognize the descriptive zest instantly. The same quasi-hapless mother seems to narrate “The Midnight Zone,” in which she imperils the lives of her boys by falling off a stool and hitting her head while alone with them at a remote cabin, “where one thing [she] liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.” Ditto for the lonely oddballs telling “Flower Hunters” and “Yport,” the longest and last story, in which the reckless mother is often coated in alcohol. These are raw, danger-riddled, linguistically potent pieces. They unsettle their readers at every pass. In the dreamy, terrific “Dogs Go Wolf,” two little girls are abandoned on an island, their starvation lyrical: “The older sister’s body was made of air. She was a balloon, skidding over the ground”; their rescue is akin to a fairy tale. Equally mesmerizing is “Above and Below,” in which the graduate student narrator sinks away and dissipates into vivid, exacting homelessness. Even the few stories that dribble off rather than end, such as “For the God of Love, For the Love of God,” have passages of surpassing beauty. And Groff gets the humid, pervasive white racism that isn’t her point but curdles through plenty of her characters.
A literary tour de force of precariousness set in a blistering place, a state shaped like a gun.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59463-451-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.
Thoughts on travel as an existential adventure from one of Poland’s most lauded and popular authors.
Already a huge commercial and critical success in her native country, Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night, 2003) captured the attention of Anglophone readers when this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. In addition to being a fiction writer, Tokarczuk is also an essayist and a psychologist and an activist known—and sometimes reviled—for her cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist views. Her wide-ranging interests are evident in this volume. It’s not a novel exactly. It’s not even a collection of intertwined short stories, although there are longer sections featuring recurring characters and well-developed narratives. Overall, though, this is a series of fragments tenuously linked by the idea of travel—through space and also through time—and a thoughtful, ironic voice. Movement from one place to another, from one thought to another, defines both the preoccupations of this discursive text and its style. One of the extended stories follows a man named Kunicki whose wife and child disappear on vacation—and suddenly reappear. A first-person narrator offers a sort of memoir through movement, recalling her own peregrinations bit by bit. There are pilgrims and holidaymakers. Tokarczuk also explores the connection between travel and colonialism with side trips into “exotic” practices and cabinets of curiosity. There are philosophical digressions, like a meditation on the flight from Irkutsk to Moscow that lands at the same time it takes off. None of this is to say that this book is dry or didactic. Tokarczuk has a sly sense of humor. It’s impossible not to laugh at the opening line, “I’m reminded of something that Borges was once reminded of….” Of course someone interested in maps and territories, of the emotional landscape of travel and the difference between memory and reality would feel an affinity for the Argentine fabulist.
A welcome introduction to a major author and a pleasure for fans of contemporary European literature.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-53419-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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