A selection that should please readers who love the traditional pleasures of storytelling, through voices that are...
A typically strong selection, though this year’s offerings are less international in setting and more often realistic than in some recent years.
As a popular novelist with a creative writing, graduate school pedigree, Perrotta (Little Children, 2004, etc.) proclaims his preference for “stories written in plain, artful language about ordinary people. I’m wary of narrative experiments and excessive stylistic virtuosity, suspicious of writing that feels exclusive or elitist.” Thus, he has applied those principles to his selections in serving as this year’s editor. In addition to the stories themselves, one of the highlights of the annual is the explanation by each writer of the genesis of the selected story, and it’s interesting how so many of these had an autobiographical seed and are filled with detail rooted in the writer’s experience. Not that any of these stories is straight memoir, but one of the most powerful, “Diem Perdidi” by Julie Otsuka, elicits this explanation from its award-winning author: “Writing it, I suppose, was my way of keeping my mother with me in the world, a way of being with her even as she was slipping away,” and such context deepens the resonance of a formally inspired narrative in which most of the sentences begin “She remembers...” and the main other character, whom the protagonist doesn’t necessarily remember, is “you.” Writes Otsuka, “She remembers that she is forgetting. She remembers less and less every day.” The anthology mixes selections from perennials such as Alice Munro (who could well be “the single writer who looms over this year’s collection—over the art of the short story as it’s practiced in America right now,” according to Perrotta), Nathan Englander, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders (the most experimental of the lot), with others who have yet to become as well-known and are published in smaller literary magazines.
A selection that should please readers who love the traditional pleasures of storytelling, through voices that are thoroughly contemporary.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-24210-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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