Like Guy Davenport’s, similarly influenced by European modernist models, Sontag’s stories can be arch, smart, and elegant—if...
Nearly 40 years after I, etcetera, a new collection of short fiction from the noted essayist and critic, revealing her to be indeed “an occasional rather than a habitual writer of short stories.”
A debriefing, in Susan Sontag’s sort-of-Lacanian language, is a data dump of sorts following some sort of emotional trauma: death, suicide, illness. Though editor Taylor finds common cause with Chekhov’s “autobiographophobia,” the fictional pieces here in fact are patently informed by events in Sontag’s life: the opening story, “Pilgrimage,” for instance, begins with Sontag at 14, having moved from Arizona to Southern California; lines such as “I felt I was slumming, in my own life” are vintage essayistic Sontag. So, in later pieces, are the flurries of apothegms: “China is certainly too big for a foreigner to understand. But so are most places.” Indeed, and like the real Sontag, the narrator of the story “Project for a Trip to China” approaches the country from earlier visits to Hanoi and Phnom Penh, complete with a son in tow named David. Later stories are more clearly fictional, some marked by the usual Manhattan immigrant’s wrinkled nose at the things of flyover country: “Once she spent two whole weeks in a little cabin in the Ozarks, catching up on back issues of The Saturday Evening Post, sleeping twelve hours a day, and occasionally yielding to the advances of George, the proprietor of the nearby Friendly Ed Motel.” Still, though not quite de Maupassant, such pieces are rich in observed detail. So it is with “Baby,” told in the voices of parents baring all to a psychiatrist about the brilliant monster they’re raising: “Baby says he was born on Krypton and that we’re not his real parents.” Talk about your little emperor….Returning to an autobiographical vein, Sontag’s collection closes with a pensive meditation on death, illness, and “the desire to stop listening to people’s distress.”
Like Guy Davenport’s, similarly influenced by European modernist models, Sontag’s stories can be arch, smart, and elegant—if sometimes a touch arid. For all that, a welcome collection.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10075-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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