This collection marks the arrival of an interesting young writer, if not a fully developed one.
Stories about lonely, disaffected people in contemporary Chile.
The characters in Flores’ debut collection are a lonely, motley bunch. They’re isolated and poor; their families are dysfunctional; they yearn for something they can’t always name. In “Lucky Me,” Denise wants desperately to feel something—anything. She’d lived an itinerant childhood, “and as she was living in shared rooms in other people’s houses, the hope began gestating that when she finally found herself surrounded by her own things, she would feel something in her heart.” But like many of the other characters, Denise is disappointed. Flores has won several prizes in her native Chile, and it’s not hard to see why: Her prose (deftly translated by McDowell) is fluid and assured. But there’s a sameness to these stories that can sometimes dip down into blandness. The narrators' voices are too similar; even as the characters differ in age, gender, and circumstance, each narrator sounds just like the last. Many of the tales feature children. In the title story, two young girls accompany their father to a job interview. In other stories, Flores seems to strive for a hard-edged—even harsh—tone, but here, she borders on precious: “Simona was sure that her father loved her, but she could also tell that something was making him feel lonely, and that all the love she could give him didn’t help.” At other times, Flores runs into the opposite mistake. Trying to avoid sentimentality, she goes too far and misses out on real feeling.
This collection marks the arrival of an interesting young writer, if not a fully developed one.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948226-24-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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