Well-observed, sometimes funny, if seemingly pointless.
Londoners get down and dirty in a debut collection of interlinked stories where everybody is either having an affair or just behaving badly.
Newcomer Liddle, formerly a Guardian columnist, now an editor at The Spectator, offers something that more authors in these busy, busily plotted times should think of including: a chart mapping out all his major (and minor) characters and their relationships to one another (solid line means they had sex, dotted means they’re just acquaintances). The problem is, though, that this sharp but underwhelming volume of short pieces doesn’t come close to meriting such a tool, which comes off as just a touch pretentious for a book that’s essentially a series of black comic vignettes about screwing around and screwing up. These are good stories in general, most of them definitely able to stand on their own. Liddle knows quite well the spoiled, bored young things who populate his pages. In “Thirty Seconds with Sophie,” he presents a complete portrait of a certain kind of self-consciously slumming rich kid blindly sampling every drug put before him and sleeping with anyone and everyone, all as a sort of constant one-person performance piece of self-obsession. Some later tales verge into a darker fantasy realm. A woman starts growing a foul covering on her skin after using a hair depilatory; not as well thought-out as it could have been, the tale ends up as a ridiculous escapade involving more hilariously disaffected Londoners and a secret US military research facility. “What the Thunder Said” is a malicious piece of clockwork nastiness in which Christian, a serial philanderer who almost enjoys the elaborate deceits around his liaisons as much (or more than) the sex itself, is coming home from an assignation when a horrific train crash leaves him with something quite impossible to just explain away. But, by the end, this is all much the same sort of thing, cycling through repetitive similar themes, not worth more than a brief glance.
Well-observed, sometimes funny, if seemingly pointless.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51308-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.
From the author of A Wrinkle in Time, 18 gemlike stories ranging from the small heartbreaks of childhood to the discovery of life on a new planet
In these stories, some previously published and others appearing for the first time in this collection, L’Engle explores family dynamics, loneliness, and the pains of growing up. In “Summer Camp,” children show a stunning capacity for cruelty, as when one writes an imploring letter to a lost friend only to witness that friend mocking the letter in front of their bunkmates; in “Madame, Or...” a brother finds his sister at a finishing school with a sordid underbelly and is unable to convince her to leave. L’Engle employs rhythm and repetition to great effect in multiple stories—the same gray cat seems to appear in “Gilberte Must Play Bach” and “Madame, Or...”—and sometimes even in the language of a single sentence: “The piano stood in the lamplight, lamplight shining through burnt shades, red candles in the silver candlesticks...red wax drippings on the base of the candlesticks.” Occasionally, emotional undertones flow over, as in the protagonist’s somewhat saccharine goodbye to her Southern home in “White in the Moon the Long Road Lies.” Overall, though, the stories seem to peer at strong emotions from the corner of the eye, and humor dances in and out of the tales. “A Foreign Agent” sees a mother and daughter in battle over the daughter’s glasses, which have come to represent the bridge between childhood and adulthood when the mother’s literary agent begins to pursue the daughter. On another planet, a higher life form makes a joke via code: The visitors will be “quartered—housed, that is, of course, not drawn and quartered.” While there is levity, many of these stories end with characters undecided, straddling a nostalgic past and an unsettled future. Although written largely throughout the 1940s and '50s, L’Engle’s lucid explorations of relationships make her writing equally accessible today.
A luminous collection that mines the mundane as cannily as the fantastic and extraterrestrial.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1782-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Not just for ghost addicts.
A collection of pleasantly creepy stories follows Hill’s debut novel (Heart Shaped Box, 2007).
Published in a number of magazines from 2001 to the present, most of the stories display the unself-conscious dash that made Hill’s novel an intelligent pleasure. In addition to the touches of the supernatural, some heavy, some light, the stories are largely united by Hill’s mastery of teenaged-male guilt and anxiety, unrelieved by garage-band success or ambition. One of the longest and best, “Voluntary Committal,” is about Nolan, a guilty, anxious high-school student, Morris, his possibly autistic or perhaps just congenitally strange little brother, and Eddie, Nolan’s wild but charming friend. Morris, whose problems dominate but don’t completely derail his family’s life, spends the bulk of his time in the basement creating intricate worlds out of boxes. Eddie and Nolan spend their time in accepted slacker activities until Eddie, whose home life is rough, starts pushing the edges, leading to real mischief, a big problem for Nolan who would rather stay within the law. It’s Morris who removes the problem for the big brother he loves, guaranteeing perpetual guilt and anxiety for Nolan. “My Father’s Mask” is a surprisingly romantic piece about a small, clever family whose weekend in an inherited country place involves masks, time travel and betrayal. The story least reliant on the supernatural may leave the most readers pining for a full-length treatment: “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead” reunites a funny but failed standup comedian with his equally funny ex-high school sweetheart Harriet, now married and a mother. Bobby has come back to Pittsburgh, tail between his legs, substitute teaching and picking up the odd acting job, and it is on one of those gigs, a low-budget horror film, that the couple reconnects, falling into their old comedic rhythms.
Not just for ghost addicts.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-114797-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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