A bit darker and harsher, perhaps, than earlier collections, but on the whole pretty much the same kind of thing this writer...
Aging, estrangement, generational conflict, sexual rivalry, irrational violence—oh, and the destruction of the world as we know it: these are the recurring themes explored with mordant comic finesse in 16 exuberantly in-your-face stories.
The predilection for daft high-concept premises displayed in such previous collections as Boyle's If the River Was Whiskey (1989) is still very much in evidence: a female triathlete’s couch-potato boyfriend works out his hidden resentments (“She Wasn’t Soft”); a divorced bartender succumbs to the charms of his nubile neighbors, a houseful of college girls whose intimate moments are broadcast for Internet subscribers (“Peep Hall”); and scattered survivors in a brave new world decimated by an Ebola-like virus reenact the idyll shared by Adam and Eve, complicated ever so slightly by the presence of an angry Other Woman (the lively title story). Boyle gives us his own jaded takes on familiar literary classics—Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is amusingly skewered in “Mexico,” and “The Black and White Sisters” impudently echoes William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”—and rewrites a lurid real-life tabloid story of several years ago in “The Love of My Life.” Feckless under-40s undergo farcical comeuppances in such haven’t-we-been-here-before productions as “Killing Babies,” “Death of the Cool,” and “Termination Dust.” Most interestingly, there’s a repeated focus on middle-aged and older protagonists rudely awakened to grim evidence of their failing powers and inescapable mortality—as witness to the stroke victim who lies undiscovered in his backyard even after his wife stumbles to his aid (“Rust”), the aging novelist who tries and fails to reconcile with his resentful estranged son (“Achates McNeil”), and the ghost who watches sorrowfully as his surviving spouse grows ever further distanced from reality (“My Widow”).
A bit darker and harsher, perhaps, than earlier collections, but on the whole pretty much the same kind of thing this writer has been cranking out since the late ’70s. If you like Boyle, you won’t be able to resist.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03005-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
A few of these gritty tales about military men have appeared in literary magazines, but they deserve a wider audience. Miller's characters have more in common than simply being members of the armed forces; they all have trouble making decisions. For people whose profession is war, they are surprisingly averse to conflict and often try to back away from it. In ``The Rifle,'' a lieutenant delivering an officer's remains to his family becomes embroiled in a disagreement between the dead man's wife and parents over who will keep the flag to be draped over the coffin, even though all he wants to do is leave town. Women are particularly suspect and mysterious to these protagonists. ``Bethune, South Carolina'' shows a soldier dating a Duke freshman who, though Catholic, has a pretty advanced vocabulary for 1965 (``I didn't find out what ejaculate meant until the next day, when I borrowed the first sergeant's dictionary and looked it up''). When she becomes pregnant and asks for $500, he arranges a cheaper abortion through a tough comrade. A mother staying with her son at a rented vacation cabin in ``Blackstone'' (Virginia) gets involved with a hard-drinking man named Billy Murdoch—who turns out to be AWOL—and begins neglecting her boy for long stretches. In the title story, a future enlistee watches from afar while his blackguard cousin seduces a prim piano teacher. Some stories fall short. ``Vancouver,'' which intersperses the saga of a man returning home from Vietnam with wartime scenes written in the style of a film script, rambles on too long, and a few too many pieces end on a note of quiet puzzlement that eventually becomes monotonous. But in the aggregate, this is an honest collection that successfully develops such recurring themes as guns and their misuse. An impressively serious and professional debut from a man who served in Vietnam himself and obviously knows whereof he writes.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-9642949-3-1
Page Count: 178
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
A peek behind the Bamboo Curtain, where Chinese poet Ha Jin, winner of the latest Flannery O'Connor Award, works out the conflicts between tradition and constraint that animate his second collection (after Ocean of Words, 1996). Ha Jin, who writes in English, is a Chinese veteran of the People's Liberation Army and, although he doesn't address political dissidence directly in his work, the 12 stories here all contain that undercurrent of cynicism in the face of authority that's common to military (as well as Communist) societies. Thus, the soldier of ``A Man-to-Be,'' who holds back from taking part in a gang-rape, not only finds himself defensive about his own manliness but is eventually shunned by his fiancÇe's family, who doubt his ability to father children, whereas the hooligan boys who terrorize their fellow classmates in ``Emperor'' discover that their popularity and status increase ever higher with each new atrocity they perpetrate. The abiding tensions of peasant life prove themselves again and again to be deeper than the Party's ideal of the New Communist Man, as in ``New Arrival'' (where a childless couple refuses to adopt a beloved young boy entrusted to their care because of their fear of bad luck) or ``Fortune'' (in which an old man's faith in fortune-telling remains so absolute that he becomes willfully deluded rather than admit that his life has been ruined). Honor remains a powerful primordial force as well, best illustrated in the predicament of the dutiful Party member who disobeys his dying mother's wish for a traditional funeral and is promptly denounced by his comrades for filial impiety; or in the public degradation of a prostitute (``In Broad Daylight''), which, however harrowing, remains a less vivid spectacle than the degradation of her accusers. Splendidly fluid and clear: Ha Jin has managed to make an utterly alien world seem as familiar as an old friend.
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-8203-1939-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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