It's one thing to have the reader's sympathy and another to hold the reader's interest.
Canadian fiction writer Heti (How Should a Person Be?, 2012, etc.) delves into the vexed question of motherhood and what the choice between having or not having a child means, culturally and personally.
The novel opens with a series of questions that are answered by the flipping of three coins in an I Ching–based technique. A note at the beginning assures the reader that "while not everything in books is true, in this book, all results from the flipping of coins are true." Worryingly, the first question posed is: "Is this book a good idea?" "Yes," the coins reply. The narrator is a published writer filled with anguish and uncertainty about the possibility of motherhood, among other things. In addition to flipping coins for the answers to questions such as "What should I be worried about? My soul?" and "Should I begin to personify this demon that brings me bad dreams?" she consults a psychic, has a tarot reading, and talks with friends, reporting every mood, dream, worry, and conversation. There are photographs and descriptions of the writing process. The author is a writer and so is the narrator! What is fiction, and what is truth?! But no amount of metafictional smoke and mirrors can make up for the absence of a compelling story. Eventually she goes on medication. "The drugs really seem to be working....Yet I fear I don't have the right to speak anymore, given these drugs. I can't pretend I have come to any answers, or any great realizations, because I am taking these drugs. I think the drugs are the reason I am feeling less bad." "Am I annoyed?" she continues. "Am I disappointed? A little bit, yes. I wanted my own magic to get rid of the pain." Some readers may find this unfiltered self-absorption helpful. Others will remember the question posed at the book's beginning and conclude that the I Ching is not the best arbiter of literary merit. "What kind of story is created when a person goes down, down, down and down—but instead of breaking through and seeing the truth and ascending, they go down, then they take drugs, and then they go up?" If you have to ask....
It's one thing to have the reader's sympathy and another to hold the reader's interest.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-627-79077-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
........ is a disquieting examination of a central, contemporary issue, and substitutes political conscience for the spiritual concern of Greene's recent vela but the battleground is still a highly personal terrain- and an individual is the chief casualty. Tom Fowler tells the story, in an attempt to exercise his guilt, and Fowler is an Englishman, a man of middle years, of few scruples, of even less courage, and disillusioned to the point of diffidence. It is in Salgon where he is stationed as a reporter that he meets Alden Pyle of the American Economic Mission, an innocent and an idealist, who belongs to ""a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the 'u'"". They have only one thing in common-Fowler's mandarin mistress Phuong whom Pyle is ready to marry. Fowler's first act of betrayal is toward Phuong- as he conceals from her the fact that his wife- in England- will not free him. His second is toward Pyle who has been engaged with a small time local General in an attempt to back a Third Force against the Communists, and when a bomb demonstration misfires, Fowler is equally responsible for the retaliation which leads to Pyle's death... A morality tale of these times- of impulsive idealism which is often ignorance on the one hand, up against the moral inertia of the rest of the world. Indochina, and the shabby, shoddy accent of the East sharpens the background for a novel which is an effective entertainment as well. It should assure a wider audience than Robert Shaplen's A Forest of Tigers (Knopf) which deals with this theme and this part of the world.
Pub Date: March 9, 1956
ISBN: 0143039024
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1956
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