Williams’ painstakingly, pointillistically composed portraits capture the small moments that can change the trajectory of a...
This spare debut collection of short stories provides a moody snapshot of modern life and love.
A sense of transience and dislocation pervades this collection of 21 short stories about the slippery relationships and maturational struggles and setbacks of 20- and 30-somethings today. The men and women who provisionally populate these pages often appear to be passing through chapters in their lives, moving from one place or phase to another. They are divorcing spouses, leaving lovers (or being left by them), quitting jobs, packing up house and moving on, or away, or back home. Written in spare prose that in several cases casts the reader as its subject—“You’ve quit your job, your flat, your boyfriend,” Williams writes in “Sundaes at the Tipping Yard,” about a woman who begins a Creative Writing MFA—the stories feel confessional, deeply personal, almost diaristic, as if they are being downloaded directly into our own brains or perhaps not intended for other ears at all. They also convey a broad everything-at-once awareness in which the ends of things are written into the beginnings of them: the eventual divorce apparent at the moment of marriage or the inevitable bad outcome of a date foretold in the care one has taken to dress for it. Loves are found and lost. A sense of self is lost and found. Williams can limn huge swaths of a character’s life in a handful of pages by zeroing in on details that communicate everything about everything, all in an instant.
Williams’ painstakingly, pointillistically composed portraits capture the small moments that can change the trajectory of a life.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12662-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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