Vintage Stone. Enough said.
Alienated, angry outsiders stalk the dangerous edges of their unraveling lives in the great American novelist’s collection of grim short fiction.
The mordant pleasures begin with a perfectly chosen epigraph, much too good to give away. Then we plunge headlong into Stone country (Bay of Souls, 2003, etc.) with the title story’s unsparing portrayal of a weary criminal lawyer’s addled relations with his nothing job in a nowhere place, and with a female prison psychologist whose demons are more than a match for his own. Hemingway is skillfully channeled in the perfectly pitched “Honeymoon,” taut as a trip-wire as it shows a newly married man sinking under the weight of his obsession with his ex-wife, and in “Charm City,” the heartless tale of a weak married man courting romantic adventure, the predatory woman who expertly encircles him and the momentum of self-destruction that consumes every wasted life herein displayed. Stone stumbles slightly in his portrait of an incipiently burnt-out scriptwriter and the emotionally unstable actress who sashays ever more destructively in and out of his life over the years (“High Wire,” which echoes a little too closely his 1986 Hollywood novel Children of Light), and in “The Archer,” which chronicles the outrageous sociopathology of a vagrant college art prof whose middle age, we guess, might be the one J.P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man would grow into. Mastery re-emerges in “From the Lowlands,” the crisp, Ambrose Bierce–like fable of an electronics mogul whose lavish western mountain retreat can’t insulate him from the shadowed clutch of nemeses approaching. Equally fine is “The Wine-Dark Sea,” in which a renegade journalist crashes an island policy conference hosted by an increasingly unhinged U.S. Secretary of Defense—Caliban meets Conrad’s “Mistah Kurtz,” as incisive literary allusions and pistol-whip prose conspire to create a hilariously funereal Götterdämmerung.
Vintage Stone. Enough said.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-38625-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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
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