A distractingly uneven compendium of 12 stories from the generally unpredictable author of two previous collections (The News of the World, 1987; Plan B for the Middle Class, 1992). Carlson's tales are narrated in a flat emotionless voice that's often deliberately at variance with their unusual, not to say outrageous, premises. For example, there's the major-league ballplayer whose line drives have accidentally killed 11 people, and whose personality is drastically altered by his frustrating celebrity status (``Zanduce at Second''). Or the convict whose incarceration stimulates his inventive skills (``A Note on the Type''), or the military leader who debates to himself the pros and cons of dumping boiling oil on invading Visigoths (``What We Wanted to Do''). Several pieces, including ``The House Goes Up,'' simply fail to develop their conceits in fruitful ways. And many are dominated by attention-getting specifics that are at best incidental to the story's main thrust—like the glorious funny- sleazy description of a wrestling show (``Mack's Mat Matches'') in ``Dr. Smile,'' or the amusing account of a seduction in ``Nightcap,'' which doesn't fit very well with the maudlin, underdeveloped story of unrequited love that contains it. Conversely, Carlson reinvents with deadpan panache the hoary old horror chestnut about the escaped maniac who barely misses slaughtering teenaged lovers parking (``The Chromium Hook''). ``Oxygen'' plumbs level after level of emotion and understanding in the richly imagined tale of a college kid whose summer job delivering oxygen to medical patients teaches him more than he wants to know about sex, death, and the baffling permutations of simple human need. And ``The Prisoner of Bluestone'' portrays with deeply moving simplicity the confusion and passion of an autoworker desperate for communication with the wife and daughter who he feels have moved beyond him. An overall disappointment, but those last two terrific stories make it clear that we'd better keep reading Carlson. (First serial to Esquire)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04068-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Unsettling in its depiction of sadistic sex acts and hauntingly sad in its portrayal of a lonely soul tittering on the edge...
Posthumous work by the unflinching Lewis (The Second Suspect, 1998, etc.) offers a chilling glimpse inside the head of a young prostitute forsaken by family and lovers.
Living in an unnamed suburb in the well-appointed house of her absent parents, who seem to care not at all what she does, first-person narrator Nina (her professional name) begins to turn tricks in the parking lot of the local train station. Details emerge in nonchalant fashion, described in a deadpan voice. Nina has had some experience with drugs, and she’s been locked up, possibly for psychiatric reasons. Her actions, which at first seem innocent or helpless, soon turn needy and ugly. Then Nina meets the customer who decides her fate, a rough guy who takes her home to his fancy house (“going up the driveway seemed to take longer than getting there”) to meet his good-looking wife (“nothing suburban or matronly going on, which was a decided relief”). Rough trade turns to horrible as Nina is forced to witness the man’s sadistic treatment of his spouse before he turns on her. Shockingly, Nina comes back for more, motivated by true human sympathy for the wife. Ingrid’s self-loathing prompts Nina to stay with her and even to suggest that she try to make a break and get away. The two women begin a love affair that stirs the apparently influential husband to vengeance; he has Nina arrested, then incarcerated in solitary confinement, which probably would have lasted forever if not for the loving intervention her counselor and therapist, Beth. The story constantly piques your expectations, but the denouement is never assured, though you’re sure it will be gruesome and brutal. Despite her penchant for slurry colloquial sentence fragments, Lewis is an enormously compelling writer: astute, risky, and unapologetic.
Unsettling in its depiction of sadistic sex acts and hauntingly sad in its portrayal of a lonely soul tittering on the edge of emotional oblivion.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2004
ISBN: 1-85242-456-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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