An iffy debut collection of nine stories and a novella: the chip on the author's shoulder is a tremendous distraction from her natural style and distinctive voice. An integration of sexuality and sport infuses these pieces, in which straight characters are, with few exceptions, evil bigots or mindless glamour gals. Some of the stories, as well, are just too slight: ``The Rescue'' is barely a sketch, its straight woman, Meredith, an easy target; and ``Sex Is an Ancient Practice'' lacks any irony or larger context. In the title story, a frustrated and recently dumped high-school basketball coach makes a pass at a needy young player in a darkened gym, and the sympathy appears to be with the coach; at the very least, the unsettling questions of the student's age and the coach's position of authority are glossed over. ``Under the Caba§a,'' with its not-yet-realized-lesbian heroine, suffers from a coy suggestiveness, while ``The Pass'' has the opposite probleman overstated case. High spots do emerge, however: In ``The Night Danny Was Raped,'' a clever stylistic techniquea core sentence is built uponis woven through a fully fleshed-out narrative with a vivid, believable protagonist. But ``The Place Before Language,'' the concluding novella—about a summer ranger on Mount Rainier who discovers an affair between fire-lookout chief Elise and Barbara, the wife of the Ranger Supervisorreverts to a lesbian-against-the-elements subtext that's by now worn thin. In the end, the connection between athleticism and lesbianismBledsoe's central focusseems a forced and tenuous stretch. Bledsoe has the tools to write for an unmodified general audience, but here her subject matter holds her back to alienatingand limitingeffect.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1995
ISBN: 1-878067-64-8
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.
A first collection from Irish-born Keegan spans the Atlantic, touching down in rural Ireland and the southern US—with results often familiar or stretched-for, yet deftly done and alluringly readable.
In the title story, a happily married woman wants to find out what it’s like to have sex with someone else—and does so indeed, in a psychological clunker that crosses Hitchcock with O. Henry while remaining ever-intriguing to the eye. A near-wizardry of language and detail, too, closes the volume, with “The Ginger Rogers Sermon,” when a pubescent girl in Ireland, sexually curious, brings about the suicide of a hulking lumberman in a tone-perfect but morally inert story. In between are longer and shorter, greater and lesser tales. Among the better are “Men and Women,” about a suffering Irish farmwife who at last rebels against a cruelly domineering husband; the southern-set “Ride If You Dare,” about a couple who shyly meet after running personals ads; and “Stay Close to the Water’s Edge,” about a Harvard student who despises—and is despised by—his millionaire stepfather. Psychologically more thin or commonplace are “Storms,” told by an Irish daughter whose mother went mad; “Where the Water’s Deepest,” a snippet about an au pair afraid of “losing” her charge; or “The Singing Cashier”—based on fact, we’re rather pointlessly told—about a couple who, unbeknownst to their neighbors, commit “hideous acts on teenage girls.” Keegan’s best include the more maturely conceived “Passport Soup,” about a man devoured by guilt and grief after his daughter goes missing while in his care; “Quare Name for a Boy,” in which a young woman, pregnant by a single-fling boyfriend whom she no longer has an interest in, determines that she’ll go on into motherhood without him; and the nicely sustained “Sisters”—one dutiful and plain, the other lovely and self-indulgent—who come to a symbolically perfect end.
Carefully worked tales that are as good as many and better than most.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-779-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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