Thirteen stories, most depicting the various confusions of the clever and the young. Richter’s characters are usually young, and the better part of these carry their youth as heavily as they would a family curse they had not quite succeeded in forgetting. Rootless and ostensibly amoral, they sometimes succeed in accidentally uncovering some meaning in their lives—just as the teenaged narrator of “The Beauty Treatment” finds herself unexpectedly reconciled to the venomous classmate who once slashed her across the face with a razor. Similarly, the very Goth narrator of “Goal 666” finds that the musical style of his Doom/Black Metal band undergoes a sudden and completely unexpected transformation (i.e., it becomes melodic and harmonious) once all of the members have fallen in love with the young woman who joins it. “Prom Night” is precisely that: the recollection of a dance attended by several very stoned teenagers, at least one of whom comes to suspect by the end of the evening that she may once have been young and innocent after all. There’s also a certain amount of art-world surrealism: “Sally’s Story” describes the art career of a family dog who becomes famous for her sculptures and performance art, while “Rats Eat Cats” is the grant application (addressed to an arts committee) of an eccentric lady who lives alone with dozens of cats and makes sculptures (which she eventually sets aflame in performance work) out of their fur. The title story describes a typically modern take on the blind-date-from-hell routine, in which a San Francisco dominatrix acquires a slave through an Internet chat-room and eventually agrees to meet with him in person—with all the usual blind-date disappointments, and then some. A bit self-consciously arty, but a debut that’s nonetheless saved from its own pretensions by a good ear for dialogue (——Do you think we—re going to remember this, Bucky?” “We can get our picture taken,” he said. “Then it won—t matter” “) and a strong eye for character.
Pub Date: July 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85701-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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