A superbly wrought set of tales, as beguiling as a midnight serenade.
Ineffectual, exuberant cries of protest are among the many ripostes to life’s absurdities in this scintillating collection of stories.
The conundrums in which Mayfield’s characters find themselves run the gamut from loveless marriage to familial die-off to disappointment on a truly epic scale. In the mordantly funny title story, a man arrives at his mother’s funeral only to be presented with a coffin containing the wrong corpse—and ends up mourning the beatific stranger more than he does his own flesh and blood. In the moving “Reliquary,” a husband who has devotedly tended his paralyzed wife for 20 years (her only means of communication are blinks and expressive eye rolls) suddenly discovers that he’s the dependent partner in the relationship. “The Next One” finds a young white schoolteacher in New Orleans in over her head when she reaches out to a troubled black student. And the simultaneously sardonic and elegiac “Which Way’s Ireland?” imagines Charles Lindbergh’s luckless double: a young flier who sets out on a solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1927, only to wind up in the most humiliating possible place. The author moves confidently across a range of registers, from the raucous cynicism of “Food Chain,” which casts Manhattan as a state of nature where everyone is both predator and prey, to the fraught pathos of “Mothers,” in which the parents of a pregnant teen, anxious that she arrange her life perfectly, pressure her to have an abortion. He writes with a deadpan wit and a limpid prose style shot through with flashes of eyeball-searing imagery. (“…head quivering, his slack-jawed mouth fixed in a jagged cracked egg of a grin as if he’s about to add a ha-cha-cha-cha like Jimmy Durante,” reads his unforgettable thumbnail of a New York street weirdo.) More than that, Mayfield has a sharp psychological acuity that really gets under the skin of his characters as they mount sublimely inappropriate responses to tragi-comic predicaments.
A superbly wrought set of tales, as beguiling as a midnight serenade.Pub Date: April 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-0975331415
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Mount Parnassus Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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