An uneven collection focusing on men, worth sifting through for the gems.
In this collection of short fiction, gay men struggle with relationships, sexuality, and life.
The volume’s six stories primarily explore the experiences of a variety of gay men. These range from a privileged high school athlete, trying to figure out his place in the world, to men just past youth seeking to make their way in Manhattan, to an aging man whiling away his final days in an upstate New York nursing home. The cleverer that Hill (Myxocene, 2015, etc.) gets, the less engaging his stories become. In the titular tale, an elderly man tries to comprehend the concepts—such as polyandry and nonbinary gender identity—that inform his grown grandchildren’s lives. While the narrator’s well-meaning attempts at understanding remain endearing, too much emphasis is placed on the premise, giving the account a sitcom feeling. The collection’s one dud, “The Prince and the Executioner,” is set “long ago in the Frenglish Kingdom of Facedom.” The faux medieval surroundings are apparently meant as a lens to establish a parable around real issues—a key question presented is “how could the King tolerate a Prince turned Princess?”—but the conceit, speech, and plot become too stilted and haphazard. On the other hand, the two stories situated in the more expected locale of early 21st-century Manhattan are very powerful. In both “The Nose” and “The Dried Plum and the Envelope,” heavy-drinking gay men circling 30 find ways to come to terms with disappointment and the choices they’ve made. Hill firmly controls the (very different) voices of each of these characters, and he deftly builds to moments of quiet betrayal. The elderly narrator of “The Final Plan” inhabits some of the same territory when he reminisces about his life in pre-AIDS Manhattan, “a place where you could feel sort of like you belonged and relatively safe.” Unfortunately, this tale soon veers into a convoluted nursing home drama. Hill’s exploration of the lives of gay men in New York is strong, nuanced, and originally drawn. The volume should be picked up for these narratives, but readers will likely wish Hill had stuck to this terrain throughout the book.
An uneven collection focusing on men, worth sifting through for the gems.Pub Date: May 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5305-6707-2
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2016
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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