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
The heroine of Dave’s newest post-feminist chick-lit romance (The Divorce Party, 2008, etc.) must choose between the quiet life offered by her new husband and the fast lane her former lover represents.
Only days after 32-year-old Annie gets dumped by longtime live-in boyfriend Nick, an up-and-coming movie director, she meets Griffin at the chichi L.A. restaurant she frequents—talk about romantic fantasy: Annie’s career as a monthly travel columnist pays well, apparently demands little time or difficult travel and is never seriously endangered—and where he is temporarily the chef. It seems to be love at first sight, although Annie’s best friend Jordan, who also happens to be Nick’s sister, calls Griffin “Rebound Guy.” Three months after they meet, he proposes. They marry in a Vegas chapel on their way across the country to Griffin’s western Massachusetts hometown, where he is about to open his own restaurant—Annie’s job with a New York paper also allows her to live anywhere. But Williamsburg requires a lot of adjusting on Annie’s part. Griffin’s genius brother Jesse and his 5-year-old twins move in with the newlyweds because Jesse’s wife has thrown him out for impregnating the MIT professor guiding his doctorate program. The twin’s art teacher turns out to be Gia, until recently Griffin’s girlfriend of 13 years, whom Griffin’s mother makes clear she’d much prefer as a daughter-in-law. Then Nick shows up from his new base in London to win Annie back; she turns him down, but she feels stirrings. When the new Rupert Murdocklike owner of her paper offers her a job in London, Griffin encourages her to try it out. Soon she’s settled in London in a fantastic apartment, the company is grooming her for a new dream job, the publisher’s dashing son is wooing her and Nick is just a call away. What’s a girl to do? A lightweight romance posing as something realistic and psychologically profound.
Pub Date: May 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02267-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lightman, a teacher of physics and writing at MIT, evokes the musings of Albert Einstein in this playful, unusual first work of fiction. It is six in the morning, and a sleepy young Einstein slumps at his desk in the patent office, dreaming of the nature of time. Time has been on Einstein's mind a lot lately, and he's become adept at envisioning each of many theories in concrete, three- dimensional form. While Einstein sleeps, Lightman takes the reader through the young genius's imagined worlds, evoking cities in which time is cyclical and citizens are doomed to repeat their triumphs and mistakes eternally; in which people routinely get caught in wandering tributaries of time and are washed back into the past; in which time is believed to flow more slowly at higher altitudes so that all humans, in order to live longer, build their houses on mountaintops; in which there is no connection between cause and effect and people live a carefree existence in each separate moment, and in which it is possible to stop time and live forever within a favorite instant. Occasionally, Einstein wakes up, goes home, dines with a friend, or stares blankly off into the distance, but the focus here is not on his personal life. Instead, with these brief, light vignettes, Lightman offers a glimpse into strange theoretical kingdoms—and also lets the reader in on the workings of a creative scientific mind. Cheerful fantasies, balanced exquisitely between poetry and the popular physics essay. (First serial to Granta and Harper's.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41646-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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