A disturbing blend of fairy tale and Freudian strangeness which comments on the outlandish fatalism of the American myth.
A debut collection melds the European fairy tale with the American yarn into an assemblage of accidental magic, frustrated metamorphoses, and chance meetings with a bewildered divine.
Habermeyer’s stories inhabit the automated modernity of the 21st-century world in a way that recalls the lingering magic of the Grimm brothers’ deep, dark woods. In “The Foot,” an enormous human foot is tugged ashore and immediately becomes a focal point for gawkers, dilettante scientists, New Age worshipers, and feral children all focused on proving this miracle is more than just the sum of its part. In “St. Abelard’s Zoo for Endangered Species,” a controlling mother is mistaken for a snow leopard until she mistakes herself for a snow leopard and is then unceremoniously dumped back into her ill-fitting human life. Rife with this sort of untransformative metamorphosis, the stories linger in the forgotten spaces of the American mystique—hardscrabble towns that do not assume the dignity of their labor; bland suburbs that do not sanctify the families who inhabit them; miraculous visitations of God’s love or wrath that do not clarify the direction of the characters’ lives. In many stories (“A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction,” “Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics But Were Too Afraid To Ask,” “What the Body Does When It Doesn’t Know What Else To Do”), Kafka’s surreal bureaucracies are blended with the particularly American myth of the homespun, and wholly unqualified, expert. Others (“Visitation,” “Ellie’s Brood,” “The Fertile Yellow,” “In Search of Fortunes Not Yet Lost,”) delve into the symbolic archetypes of woman as empty vessel, empty egg, source of arcane magic, castrating hacker of turkey necks and stacks of kindling. Crowded with metaphor and only loosely linked events, these stories can overwhelm the reader with the sheer vigor of their worlds; however, the total effect of all this ultrafamiliar strangeness is a provocative discombobulation that repays the patient reader’s perseverance.
A disturbing blend of fairy tale and Freudian strangeness which comments on the outlandish fatalism of the American myth.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-942683-60-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BOA Editions
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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