Series editor Kenison makes great claims for this year’s gathering: “You will close this book with a greater sense of who we...
Over half the protagonists of Best American Short Stories 2000 are anything but white middle class: the American short story, this collection suggests, has gone global.
We have, for instance, Chinese-American Ha Jin’s “The Bridegroom,” about the wedding of an unattractive woman to a closeted homosexual in a Manchurian city; Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon’s “Blind Josef Pronek,” the story of a journalist from Sarajevo who haphazardly immigrates to Chicago and works his way into America while watching his country being torn apart on CNN; and Dominican-American Junot Diaz’s “Nilda,” which reprises his narrator, Yunior, while closing the book on Yunior’s cancer-stricken older brother Rafa. Also on hand is Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” (from her Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies), about the relationship between an elderly landlady and her tenant, an Indian newly arrived in turbulent Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969. In Walter Mosley’s “The Fly,” an African-American mailroom worker mistakes a white secretary’s revulsion for him as racial prejudice, while she interprets his innocent crush as sexual harassment. In Marilyn Krysl’s “The Thing Around Them,” a Sri Lankan fears for her son’s life after a friend’s son is dragged to death behind a jeep. The horrors, the absurdities, the perils, and the possibilities of the millennial globe—all are well represented. Several pieces also feature white middle-class protagonists. Michael Byers’s “The Beautiful Days” is a coming-of-ager about a student wrestling with roommates and Herodotus. “Call If You Need Me,” a recently discovered Raymond Carver story, echoes the themes and tones of Carver’s later work.
Series editor Kenison makes great claims for this year’s gathering: “You will close this book with a greater sense of who we are as a nation. . . .” Guest editor Doctorow identifies a formal freedom in today’s short story: a “literary shackle has been broken.” Both claims are borne out, more or less.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-92687-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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