Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.
From three-time O. Henry winner Muñoz, a new and often luminous collection, his third.
Many of the stories gathered here are set in the 1980s and '90s and feature people living in severely straitened and threatened circumstances: the families of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California's Central Valley who are routinely rounded up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, repatriated, and then return, again and again; gay men in an age of AIDS and widespread homophobia; trapped and housebound teens. In "The Reason Is Because," we meet a high school girl forced by pregnancy to drop out of school. She lives with her mother and her newborn in near isolation, and the only hope for change anyone seems able even to imagine is a marriage to the swaggering, not-very-bright, and mostly uninterested father. In "Anyone Can Do It," the wife of a fruit picker who (though American-born) has been hauled away with his co-workers by La Migra is swindled out of her chief asset by a neighbor she'd thought an ally. Another standout is the moving title story, in which Mark, a water-company clerk, falls in love with Teddy, a sweet-tempered, beautiful young man who's been hustling in LA, and is surprised when Teddy seems not only willing, but eager to leave the glitz of the city to settle with him in Fresno. Eventually it's revealed that Teddy is dying of AIDS. Mark kicks him out and then—tortured—drives all the way to the small Texas town where Teddy was born and where, it turns out, he has just died. Perhaps best of all is the closer, "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Here we meet a rule-following Texas teen who bristles at the strictures of home and the narrowness of her prospects but sees little way around them. Her bolder or just more desperate younger brother keeps running off, looking for a wider world that might accept him. Her task is to find him and bring him home—until, that is, her brother manages to get far enough away to provide escape velocity for her, too.
Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64445-206-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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