Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer.
A short story collection that explores its characters’ sensibilities with delicacy and precision.
Of these 12 stories, seven have been previously published, and two received Pushcart Prize nominations. Taylor (Everything to Do with You, 2010) sets his tales mostly in San Francisco, often among 20-somethings struggling to make it as they navigate relationships, work, and life’s alarums and excursions. The opening story, “Flight and Weightless,” is particularly successful: two young people were once a couple, but Maria stayed in Spokane, Washington, when the narrator returned to San Francisco. Now she’s dying of cancer, and he’s helping her fulfill a last wish—to push a grand piano onto a frozen lake so she can play it: “Thick spots [on the ice] sound like a chandelier reuniting with the ground.” In that sentence, everything depends on the unexpected but perfect “reuniting”—the chandelier’s fall (or the piano’s, or Maria’s) isn’t a disaster but a reunion. Taylor often achieves his lapidary style through similarly unexpected but fitting conjunctions; in the same story, the narrator wonders, “Who coined winter wonderland? Were they not aware of hypothermia and giving up, and goddamn Spokane?” The “and” phrases, as they move from the general to the particular (from cold weather to one couple’s breakup), nicely mirror how people personalize disaster. Some quirks, such as Taylor’s frequent interest in fingers and toes, add a surreal touch to these stories. The author seems aware of the danger that such a style can devolve into preciousness or portentousness, and in “Depluralize the Pair” he both enacts and criticizes this dynamic. His narrator proclaims, for example, that relationships “always progress or end in ceremonies. Divorce or marriage.” Or death, perhaps, or just tapering off? But if readers become irritated at this 20-something know-it-all narrator, the story subverts the situation by granting him some self-recognition as he gets older, with his knees creaking as he unloads the dryer: “We wanted everything to be art….We finally had to deal with something hard, that wasn’t artsy or youthful or innocent.”
Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0578152981
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Seventh Tangent
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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