Bleak but sometimes funny tales show Lychack’s (The Wasp Eater, 2004) knack for ellipses, pushing readers to fill in deliberate narrative and stylistic omissions.
The book opens with “Stolpestad,” perhaps the most brutal story in a collection that doesn’t shy away from desolation. Other pieces cover an impressive range of emotional and imaginative territory: A woman buys chicks in the hope of raising chickens and getting fresh eggs only to find herself engaged in a perverse struggle with a mostly male brood and her skeptical husband; a couple’s quest for help butchering the deer they strike with their car reveals their own emotional wounds. Narratives combine to illuminate a rural, small-town world where women phone the American Legion or Elks halls to call drunk husbands home, and where damaged characters gaze on one another with wantonness, judgment and need. The moods are many and varied: There’s the sad reverie of an old woman visiting family following the death of her husband; the melancholy prophecy of a plant hybridizer’s wife anticipating his death; and a fabulist triptych, about a beloved teacher who comes from the sea, that touches on themes of loss, transformation and transcendence. The disciplined storytelling and barbed wit strike a fine balance.
Pub Date: March 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-618-30243-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Ebershoff (The Danish Girl, 2000) strikes a chord over and again, sure to resonate like soulful music to some and clanking...
A well-honed but less-than-striking collection about discontented gay men caught between troubled childhoods, diminished lives, and the shifting winds of their uncertain futures.
Whether the setting is Boston or Pasadena, the men and boys inhabiting the shrunken worlds of each of Ebershoff’s seven tales have more in common than not. In “The Charm Bracelet,” Billy is a high-school kid who likes to cruise at a nearby gay bar, but has yet to go beyond being flirtatious, sharing drinks, and taking phone numbers. A chance encounter with a frightened woman in a darkened park threatens to shine some reality into his life before he shuts it out again. The title story features Roland, a 48-year-old swelled to bursting with a sense of his own importance to the community. Watching men in the locker room of his athletic club, he “boiled a batch of distaste, one that would stay with him through the day.” Like all of Ebershoff’s men, Roland longs for much more than he could ever have and pays a dear price for all that attention focused elsewhere. Similarly, in “Tresspass,” the book’s spooky conclusion, the teenage narrator sleepwalks through his stunted life, suffused with dreams of what could and should be. Some of the stories, like the opener, “Chuck Paa,” in which an acne-scarred home-health aide moves from one dying AIDS patient to another, cling to you with the intensity of their sadness and sense of limitation. But for all the assured and talented writing on display here, the refrain of themes—distant families, relentless hunting for something better, obsessions with physical perfection—and sameness of tone level out the collection’s high points.
Ebershoff (The Danish Girl, 2000) strikes a chord over and again, sure to resonate like soulful music to some and clanking repetition to others.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89483-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
This debut collection of stories from a crackerjack craftsman lacks a coherent theme, almost as if D'Ambrosio had chosen a magic number (seven, in this case) of complete stories and decided to publish them when he reached it. That said, each of these stories, some of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, is excellent in its own right. D'Ambrosio consistently presents new ways of seeing familiar things. Sometimes the thematic fragmentation actually works to his advantage, forcing the reader to begin each tale with a clean slate, but more often it is disconcerting. In the poignant title story, a young boy is enlisted by his mother to walk a drunken guest home from a party, uncertain whether she is coming on to him Mrs. Robinsonstyle or not, and along the way he recalls the suicide of his father. In ``American Bullfrog,'' another confused young man hesitates to carve up his frog in freshman biology class and runs away from home—but lamely can think of nowhere to go beyond his buddy's house. There are also a few stories of vacant people unable to express their emotions. In ``Her Real Name,'' a man picks up a religious young woman working at an Illinois gas station who believes that her cancer is in remission due to an act of God. Separation is present here, too: ``Open House'' is narrated by one son in a large family whose parents are divorcing after a long, violent marriage and whose brother Jackie was a teenage junkie who killed himself. ``Lyricism'' has two sections: In the first, a man and woman visit Lake Placid on vacation in October; in the second, the man wanders alone on a January evening. Individually, these are imaginative stories, but they're linked by few common threads of theme, place, or literary structure.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-17144-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
