Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.
A collection of stories that examine coming of age, family, and Diné life.
The book opens with "Dormant," in which 17-year-old Bernadine becomes involved in a relationship with 24-year-old Aaron after helping him rescue an abandoned kitten. Bernadine considers her mother’s choice in men who are always “jailbirds” and what her future might look like with Aaron, a white man. “Interracial couples always had a hard time on the reservation, especially when the woman was Navajo,” she notes. This theme of the expectations imposed on Navajo women recurs several times; the stories look closely at the connections between self and community and also provide a view of reservation life and traditions. In "The Casket in the Backseat," a man gets a ride from a hearse and discovers his grandfather’s spirit is trapped in the casket. In "Snow Bath Season," a dead mother speaks to her daughter through Amazon’s Alexa. In the title story, a teen witnesses the disappearance of Miss Northwestern Arizona. These ingenious tales are rangy in their scope and form. “Under the Porchway” is notable for the way it interweaves plot with instructions for how to butcher a sheep. The author's sharp prose is amplified by extraordinary similes such as “roots clenched into the earth like wiry brown fists” and “veins clung in clusters beneath the skin of their hands like turquoise squash blossoms.” Not only are the metaphors and similes surprising, but the turns within each story are as well. Just when it feels like a plot might move into a familiar trope, it upends itself in the best way. The stories don’t provide tidy resolutions, but they reveal essential truths about the continued effects of colonization on Indigenous people, including the lack of resources on tribal lands, ongoing mental health and substance abuse crises, violence against women, and Indigenous women going missing.
Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781948814850
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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