Despite flickers of optimism, this is a somber collection pondering mortality, fate, and the unknowability of others.
The John Cheever of her generation, Beattie (The State We’re In: Maine Stories, 2015, etc.) has long chronicled the emotional foibles of upper-middle-class WASPs with sharply chiseled wit; in these 13 new stories, travel or a visit of some sort is the common thread, mortality the common theme.
The settings are along the East Coast with an emphasis on favorite Beattie locales Key West and Maine. Her characters, even those who have fallen in status, are well-educated and of nominally liberal political persuasion. While elderly characters predominate, the middle-aged and younger face their own regrets. In “Anecdotes,” elderly, self-centered Lucia’s story of passion shocks her daughter Christine’s friend Anna into mitigating pain she and Christine may have caused a shared lover’s wife years earlier. In “Other People’s Birthdays,” 40-something Lawry visits her parents and sister Bett for Bett’s birthday and witnesses the burden her parents carry in managing the mentally ill Bett’s care. In two stories, young women travel to visit older men they admire—a former professor in the case of “The Indian Uprising”; in “The Cloud,” a beloved uncle—only to realize the men are privately confronting fatal illnesses and are beyond the women’s help. Another professor hosting former students fears he’s dying in “Company.” Eighty-year-old Gerald, attending a Manhattan Christmas party in “For the Best,” and wheelchair-bound Alva, attending a Key West Christmas party in “Lady Neptune,” both feel perplexed that life has passed them by. But the unnamed 80-year-old narrator of “The Gypsy Chooses the Whatever Card” performs a good deed for a younger woman and is rewarded with moments of unexpected excitement. In the charming “Hoodie in Xanadu,” an elderly Key West widow forms an unexpected partnership with her agoraphobic neighbor, who has transformed his living room into a secret Xanadu. The middle-aged former frat brothers in “The Debt,” perhaps the volume’s darkest story, confront how “debased” their lives have become during a trip to Key West that ends in tawdry violence.
Despite flickers of optimism, this is a somber collection pondering mortality, fate, and the unknowability of others.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1138-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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