There is nothing tentative in this collection—these are fully formed talents.
This latest collection of stories from US and Canadian writing programs is vibrant and diverse, well up to the high standard set by its predecessors.
Novelist Miller (Lost in the Forest, 2005, etc.) has assembled 15 stories, all roughly contemporary, except “The Temperate Family,” by Caimeen Garrett, a remarkable account of an anguished father’s search for his kidnapped son in 1876. As before, the immigrant experience is well-represented: Russians in Pittsburgh (Ellen Litman’s “About Kamyshinskiy”), Indians in Houston (Keya Mitra’s “Pompeii Recreated”) and a Pakistani in limbo (Fatima Rashid’s “Syra”). The standout in this group is “A Correct Life,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story about Liem, an 18-year-old Vietnamese who flees Saigon in 1975 and is taken in by a gay couple in San Francisco—culture shock has seldom been so perceptively rendered. American families experience shocks of their own. Blue-collar father and college-dropout son circle each other grimly after the old man’s divorce (“Karaoke Night,” by Dan Pope); sparks fly when alcoholic, four-times-married Frederick the Third shows up for his grandfather’s funeral and finds forgiveness in short supply (“The Freddies,” by M.O. Walsh). Another grandfather, dying in Puerto Rico, gets no respect from his son or grandson, who are off partying elsewhere in the Caribbean; for sheer exuberance, nothing beats this freewheeling story by Kevin A. González (“Wake”). Equally good, in a quieter way, is Anne de Marcken’s “Ashes”; here, a widow ponders the gap between image and reality as she scatters her husband’s ashes. Sometimes characters are dwarfed by a theme (exurban development obliterating American folklore, in Lydia Peelle’s “Shadow on a Weary Land”); sometimes a character sketch serves for a story, whether it’s a control freak masquerading as a good neighbor (Alice J. Marshall’s “By Any Other Name”) or a black postgraduate struggling with a drug habit (T. Geronimo Johnson’s “Winter Never Quits”); yet there is fine observation even in these lesser offerings.
There is nothing tentative in this collection—these are fully formed talents.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-603155-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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