Lean, intriguing, formally innovative prose that will satisfy some readers while leaving others hungry for meatier plots.
National Book Award winner Tuck (The Double Life of Liliane, 2015, etc.) turns her attention to Emily Brontë's gothic, psychologically riveting Wuthering Heights in Heathcliff Redux, the novella at the center of this collection.
It's 1963 in rural Virginia, and the unnamed narrator, who's a mother and the wife of a cattle farmer, is rereading Wuthering Heights when she finds herself inexplicably drawn to a morally compromised man named Cliff. Although warned that Cliff is "too good-looking for his own good," "reckless," and untrustworthy, the narrator falls hard. The story of their affair unfolds as collage: Interspersed with passages from Wuthering Heights, snippets of Brontë's biography, and critical commentary on the novel, the narrator reports in short dispassionate sections on the places she and Cliff make love, on Cliff's lies, and on her husband's affair, among other things. Places or things that arise in scenes from Wuthering Heights or the narrator's own story (Rehoboth Beach, cuckoos, Boeuf Bourguignon) are sometimes glossed on the next page, underscoring the extent to which facts are not necessarily truths. Though the narrator is looking back (much of the secondary material was published 30 years after the affair), hindsight doesn't help her understand why she allowed Cliff to become the force of so much destruction. Instead, the human heart remains a mystery, which seems to be the point. This may disappoint readers who expect fiction to explore the reasons for characters' actions or the novella to shed new light on Brontë's novel (or vice versa). The final four stories are both stranger and more conventional. The characters do things surprising (like carrying a dead swan home) and shocking (murdering a teenage girl), and yet the past always catches up with the present, emphasizing the age-old belief—and plot of much fiction—that you can't escape the consequences of your actions.
Lean, intriguing, formally innovative prose that will satisfy some readers while leaving others hungry for meatier plots.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4759-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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