Underappreciated as a novelist, Maxwell does little to enhance his reputation by collecting his short fiction, a volume of stories written over the past 50 years. The complete contents of the justly praised Billy Dyer (1991)- -related stories that resemble Maxwell's novels—are reproduced here. And the last quarter of the collection reprints what Maxwell himself calls ``improvisations,'' a series of fractured fables originally written to entertain his wife. These slight modern morality tales derive whatever complexity they have by juxtaposing archaic diction and contemporary concerns, but they're mostly too formulaic. An industrious tailor can't appreciate life in the present; a carpenter breaks his vow to keep secrets and shatters a town's serenity; in a land of immortals, the people begin to commit suicide. At two or three pages each, these provide Maxwell little room to flex his literary muscle. But even the stories from Maxwell's first collection of fiction—mostly about Upper East Side Manhattanites who live in fear of the city's darker corners and escape to country houses—aren't that impressive. The stories about French travel and its disappointments seem like cautionary tales for the sophisticated traveler. In ``A Game of Chess,'' Maxwell is particularly caustic about boorish Americans from the heartland who can't understand their bohemian relations in New York. The best stories, like Maxwell's novels, are nostalgic, recalling a genteel bourgeois life in downstate Illinois in the earlier decades of the century. ``What Every Boy Should Know'' beautifully captures the pangs of adolescence as an awkward boy copes with sex and a demanding father. Maxwell waxes poetic about a charming walk-up in Manhattan's Murray Hill in ``The Thistles of Sweden'' and sorrowfully rues the decline of New York in ``The Lily-White Boys,'' a sour tale of a Christmas Eve burglary. If you've already read Billy Dyer, there's little here worth exploring, especially if you haven't yet enjoyed Maxwell's wonderful novels.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43829-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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