An excellent collection. Hansen can write.
A diverse, well-written collection from a writer in complete control of his material.
Recipient of an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, author of eight novels (A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, 2011, etc.) and one previous collection of short stories, Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University. This collection of 19 stories could be roughly divided into two types: Midwest realism and noirish entertainments. The title story is in the latter category. Writing in prison with the help of his cellmate, “the Professor,” the narrator recounts all he did to win a stripper’s heart. “Red-Letter Days” is in the former category. Diary entries of a retired, Nebraska-based, frustratingly forgetful, golf-obsessed former attorney note golf outings, the deaths of friends and his wife’s declining health. “True Romance” and “Wilderness” are pieces of magical realism. His well-tempered sentences weave the thread that leads us into and out of these labyrinths. Here Hansen’s gifts allow him to suppress explanation in the service of atmosphere. “Can I Just Sit Here for a While?” is a bit of Midwestern noir. The successful salesman, contemplating opening his own business, moves back to South Bend, Ind., and a night on the town with former Notre Dame classmates turns strange when one of the group confronts a carload of surly high school students. “Wilde in Omaha” is a witty title for a reporter’s record of a visit by Oscar Wilde. “Wickedness” chronicles several characters’ fates in a terrible blizzard from the same period as Wilde’s visit.
An excellent collection. Hansen can write.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1758-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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