Smith’s frequent focus on the bizarre clouds his vision.
Debut collection of nine limp stories, some realistic, others whimsical.
The opening story, “Isolettes,” illustrates that limpness. An, a translator, has “given up on relationships.” Still, she tells her gay friend Jacob, she’d like a baby because she feels “a bit adrift.” She arranges an artificial insemination with Jacob; the baby is a preemie; it dies in the incubator. Ironically, Jacob is more distraught than An, who stays detached, as does the reader. In the last and longest story, “Jaybird,” Benoit is a struggling, fairly talented stage actor. He’s also vain, competitive, promiscuous and dull. His apprentice in a theater mentoring program is Madeleine, a smart, resourceful scheduler at a talent agency whose famous clients treat her like a piece of furniture. Madeleine uses Benoit to get her revenge. This should have been her story, but Benoit is the lead, which makes for an uninvolving denouement. Smith also misfires with “Scrapbook,” the obliquely told story of a campus massacre that focuses on the relationship between Thomas, a survivor, and his girlfriend Amy. Thomas’s cowardly behavior is never examined deeply enough. Smith is more on target with “Green Fluorescent Protein,” in which 17-year-old Max fights his attraction to another male teenager. Max’s mother, a recovering alcoholic, gets her own story, (“Funny Weird or Funny Ha Ha?), a meandering lament for her dead husband. The best and worst stories are purely fanciful. In the title story, eight-year-old Eepie Carpetrod finds her age and brainpower accelerating dramatically, courtesy of a rare syndrome. She becomes famous, with her own cable talk show; then in old age, the process goes into reverse; the story is short, and it sizzles. “Extremities” is about some calfskin gloves in love with a store detective, and a dead astronaut’s right foot that makes landfall in a rosebush. Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds.
Smith’s frequent focus on the bizarre clouds his vision.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-38610-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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