At his (frequent, though inconsistent) best, this is one of our better storytellers. It’s about time for a Ron Carlson...
The agonies of adolescence and the moral confusions of adulthood and middle age are observed with finely honed wit in this entertaining fourth collection from the Arizona author of Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1977) and Plan B for the Middle Class (1992).
There are two brief interludes, one a wry explanation of how real life gets fictionalized, the other a teenager’s imaginary romantic personals ad: they echo each other, but their linkage is not otherwise explored. The nine fully developed stories, as varied and uneven a lot as are the contents of its three predecessors, uniformly employ a witty, knowing (usually first-person) narrative voice and a tangy colloquial style that often bursts into authentic comic aphorism (e.g., “It was a bit like being in the army: when in doubt, paint something”). A few stories fall flat: “The Clicker at Tips,” about a nowhere relationship played out in a bar whose patrons watch Monday-night football, and “Gary Garrison’s Wedding Vows,” about the love life of a woman led by her inchoate “feelings,” seem especially lame. But when Carlson creates a protagonist with an original relationship to his milieu and circumstances, he can dazzle. The title story’s rich portrayal of a conflicted sport fisherman’s experiences with his current woman and with a man formerly encountered in extreme circumstances, and thereafter unforgotten, expertly jumbles various marital, parental, and sexual “feelings” together. In “Towel Season” and “The Potato Gun,” timid, passive family men are shaken into riskier, hence more fulfilling—and threatening—behavior. And Carlson’s at his best in “Evil Eye Allen,” a dippy anti-romance about high school hormonal mischief and homespun Satanism, and especially, “The Ordinary Son,” a delightful tale of growing up among—and away from—a family of Texan geniuses, including a NASA physicist, a save-the-planet poet, and a girl who calls herself “Isotope.”
At his (frequent, though inconsistent) best, this is one of our better storytellers. It’s about time for a Ron Carlson Selected Stories.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28605-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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