Alternately light and moving, Bad Haircut is a first collection of short stories about a boy growing up in Darwin, New Jersey, during the '70s and early '80s. Buddy is an ordinary boy whose life's dramas are acted out on the stage of his suburban streets. The first stories in the collection are the least satisfying. In ``The Weiner Man,'' Buddy is a Boy Scout who learns that the mascot of a hot-dog company is an old friend of his mother's; in ``Thirteen,'' he watches his friend Kevin struggle with his parents' divorce and find a fast girlfriend. The stories become more engaging as Buddy enters high school. In ``Race Riot,'' in which Buddy steals a black child's basketball after a rumble is canceled, and in ``Snowman,'' in which he mistakenly takes revenge for a fight on an innocent neighbor, Perrotta captures with humor and stinging observation the peer pressures that make good boys do stupid and cruel things with their friends. Buddy learns from his regret, and in ``Forgiveness,'' he admires a sensitive, honorable high school jock who stands up for himself in the face of conflict. In one of the funniest stories in the bunch, ``You Start to Live,'' Buddy takes driver's education with a racy classmate, Laura, who gives him his first taste of sex, a broken heart, and a bad haircut. In two stories later in the book, ``The Jane Pasco Fan Club'' and ``Just the Way We Were,'' Buddy struggles to find love with no luck—Jane Pasco goes back to her old boyfriend, the mayor's son, who gets her on television, and prom-date Sharon turns out to be a lesbian. A balanced humorous and sometimes poignant collection, that, despite its strengths, may be more for the Sassy set than for that of the New Yorker.
Pub Date: June 8, 1994
ISBN: 1-882593-05-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
The latest Flannery O'Connor Award winner offers a first volume of 11 stories (most originally published in literary reviews) featuring odd young women and men dealing with loss, failed relationships, and the difficulties of adulthood. Brenner's female slackers don't cultivate their eccentricities; they're just ill at ease in the ordinary world and often find themselves attracted to men of dubious charms. The narrator of ``Round Bar,'' a lover of men and animals, follows her married boyfriend from a bar in Florida where he performs back to his native Nashville, where she waits in a hotel to spend fugitive moments with him. The young woman of ``A Little Something'' falls for an older man with a really good line, one smoothly suggesting a sense of the miraculous. The narrator of ``Easy'' finally bails out of a relation with a violent bully. Lack of ambition plagues Brenner's twentysomething young women: The typist in ``Undisclosed Location'' feels extra-worthless when the fat slob down the hall scores big in the state lottery. A drab secretary in ``Guest Speaker'' invents a new self to present to a visiting speaker whom she must chauffeur from the airport. And in ``I Am the Bear,'' a young woman who hands out ice cream samples in a supermarket while wearing a bear costume loses her job by offending a local celebrity. Brenner's hapless protagonists struggle against their own fears—of wildness, of passion, of danger, and of recklessness. The men in these tales are equally awkward and uncertain: The grad student in ``The Oysters,'' working on a project in Agricultural Science, is frustrated in his love for his married prof and begins to feel like the oysters he's studying. The college-educated waiter in ``The Reverse Phone Book'' experiences so deep a ``chronic unease with the normal pace and pitch of the world'' that people assume he's retarded. Quirky, challenging tales and an impressive debut.
Pub Date: May 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-8203-1794-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
The style and originality lacking in these 12 commonplace stories is almost made up for in sincerity. Ardizzone cares about the moral and social dimensions of growing up in ethnic Chicago during the '50s and '60s, even if he articulates his passion in leaden prose. Attentive to detail and atmosphere, the author seldom ventures here from home turf. The story ``Baseball Fever,'' in fact, seems to be an earlier version of Ardizzone's novel Heart of the Order (1986), complete with the deadly line drive by Danny Bacigalupo into the Adam's apple of Mickey Meenan. Chicago's north side is the setting for many of these humorless tales—like ``Nonna,'' about an aged immigrant woman who wanders the old neighborhood, unfamiliar with the new smells and sounds. Most of the pieces, though, concern a child's point of view, as with the young altar boy of ``The Eyes of the Children'' who wants to believe that the bleeding man seen in church was Christ; or another boy, in ``The Language of the Dead,'' who, falsely accused of starting a fight, freaks out when a Christian Brother smacks him around. The long ``Holy Cards'' also relies on that old favorite—the horrors of literally believing the Baltimore Catechism, which the protagonist subverts by developing a martyrology of the Chicago Cubs. Tortured sexuality is part of the profile here: In ``Idling,'' the narrator remembers his first girlfriend and his fumbling deflowering; ``Ladie's Choice'' offers the sexual confusions of a self-described greaser; and ``The Daughter and the Tradesman'' gives a Catholic girl's view as she brutally sacrifices her virginity. Warm memories of an ethnic mom surface on the occasion of her hospitalization in ``My Mother's Stories''; a father and son silently bond in ``Ritual,'' a fishing- trip tale; and a light note is managed in ``World Without End'' when a son escapes his overbearing parents by moving away, even though their visits revive all the conflicts. Nostalgic narratives with no frills.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-252-06483-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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