A sharp, melancholic, and knowing addition to the long shelf of Angeleno literature.
These 10 interconnected stories trace a web of Hollywood relationships, revealing how careless decisions can have repercussions for decades—on and off the big screen.
The book opens with 72-year-old Lee Rockwell, an over-the-hill actor who used to star in Westerns in which his characters often died. His one-time affair with his co-star, Harry, broke up both their families—a doubly painful memory now that Harry has just died of old age. Harry’s funeral also haunts other characters, who go on to make cameos in one another’s stories. Thonson offers acrobatic dialogue in scenes that feel both realistic and satirical. Many of his interactions have the terse, economical style of the late Raymond Carver’s work. Even the subtlest lines carry power and significance: “You have to come all the way out here just to see the stars these days,” ponders Pettus, a homicide detective who drives into the country for target practice in the middle of the night. Thonson’s Los Angeles is a place of dysfunctional, pill-popping families and sociopathic drifters. In “Western,” a wayward youth squats at a dead man’s house before ultimately deciding to burgle it. The protagonist of “Montage” gets into a fistfight in the middle of the highway with a group of privileged Iranian thugs. That same story features the recurring line, “Never take a meeting with the man who has murdered your wife,” which sounds figurative at first—until the murder turns out to be literal. Hope and reconciliation seem unlikely in such a sordid world, but Thonson sprinkles his stories with moments of moving decency. The final tale, for example, depicts a startling tryst between Victor, a polio-afflicted seismologist, and Nora, his childhood neighbor; their meeting is desperate, unexpected, and perfectly encapsulates the book’s sad romance. At first glance, the book’s title has the noirish ring of a B movie. But as these world-weary characters discover, dying of love would be a blessing.
A sharp, melancholic, and knowing addition to the long shelf of Angeleno literature.Pub Date: May 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460928745
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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