Are one limp Nameless story and a sheaf of apprentice work and also-rans worth the price of admission? You decide.
Of these 14 stories originally published in AHMM, EQMM, and their ilk, half date from the 1970s, when Pronzini was still struggling with his craft. None is especially engaging, and only one, “One of Those Cases,” involves the author’s signature creation, the Nameless Detective, as he tails a husband who may be cheating, or worse. “A Craving for Originality” and “Prose Bowl” (this last coauthored with Barry N. Malzberg) show hack writers run amok; “Fergus O’Hara, Detective” and “Angel of Mercy” both set in the latter stages of the War Between the States, feature an ersatz Pinkerton agent and a nutty abortionist as their protagonists. A magician steals the show in “Quicker than the Eye” (coauthored with Michael Kurland), and cop partners consider stealing as a second career in “Opportunity.” The two shortest and weakest entries, “Mrs. Rakubian” and “I Didn’t Do It,” rely on lookalikes and incriminating nonconfessions for their effect, or lack thereof; a best friend’s murder and that of a revenue agent long ago come to light respectively in “Under the Skin” and “Smuggler’s Island.” Wine turns to vinegar and a wine cellar into a crypt in “Connoisseur”; a son outdoes his nasty daddy in “Chip”; and an overfriendly couple scare the bejesus out of another couple in “A Taste of Paradise.”
Are one limp Nameless story and a sheaf of apprentice work and also-rans worth the price of admission? You decide.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7862-3557-8
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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 thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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