jmyanish's review against another edition
3.0
The first part of the collection felt uneven. Was the mental/physical link present in the male-driven stories intentionally left out of the psychologically driven female lead stories? Overall redeemed by the sympathetic and wholesome Fall River stories.
samantha's review against another edition
4.0
We don’t spend enough time talking about how good Peter Orner is.
megklaughtland's review against another edition
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Diverse cast of characters? No
5.0
an_enthusiastic_reader's review against another edition
4.0
Thanks to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The characters in this story collection oftentimes feel disconnected from the roles they seem to be stuck in. The stories take place from 1950 to the 1990s, with the distinct sensibility of a pre-technology era. Many of the stories are about family who are cast out from their expected roles due to poor luck, addiction, and mental illness. Orner's prose pulls on threads of loneliness and exhaustion, and within the collection's thematic sections, the brief stories connect to one another.
There are two sections of this book that feature one narrator. In short glimpses, this unnamed man, who is a writer, explores the plights of people in his family, aunts and uncles, town criminals. Later, we see him look back at his education, then his life with a wife. These micro-stories, which are not conventionally formed, are vivid and poignant. And the narrator uses language that feels conversational. He says of an aunt, "[she] was in her late forties when she moved back home. The word was that she was "a little off." Nobody by my father went as far to say she was crazy. He'd tell anybody who listened what a loon his sister was." In a sense, the writer's whole childhood and young adulthood come alive on the page. The way he tells his stories confer an understanding of our common humanity, a love, even for the castaways of modern life. This is the collection's most ardent theme.
In addition to affection for the disaffected, religion, commerce, and sexual connections are important, too. These themes come up often in the novella "Walt Kaplan is Broke." Relying on some history from earlier stories, the novella takes place in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1977. Walter Kaplan has bypassed death by cardiac arrest, leaving him to evaluate his whole life, marriage, friendships, and the history of the town itself. Walt has been a business failure, and was depressed before he nearly died. When he wakes up, he has to find his place among the living.
Orner has the ability to give a skeleton of details about a character's life and trust that the reader can fill in the gaps and leap from story to story to understand an overarching message about our pasts. It's a rare talent and these stories are its evidence.
The characters in this story collection oftentimes feel disconnected from the roles they seem to be stuck in. The stories take place from 1950 to the 1990s, with the distinct sensibility of a pre-technology era. Many of the stories are about family who are cast out from their expected roles due to poor luck, addiction, and mental illness. Orner's prose pulls on threads of loneliness and exhaustion, and within the collection's thematic sections, the brief stories connect to one another.
There are two sections of this book that feature one narrator. In short glimpses, this unnamed man, who is a writer, explores the plights of people in his family, aunts and uncles, town criminals. Later, we see him look back at his education, then his life with a wife. These micro-stories, which are not conventionally formed, are vivid and poignant. And the narrator uses language that feels conversational. He says of an aunt, "[she] was in her late forties when she moved back home. The word was that she was "a little off." Nobody by my father went as far to say she was crazy. He'd tell anybody who listened what a loon his sister was." In a sense, the writer's whole childhood and young adulthood come alive on the page. The way he tells his stories confer an understanding of our common humanity, a love, even for the castaways of modern life. This is the collection's most ardent theme.
In addition to affection for the disaffected, religion, commerce, and sexual connections are important, too. These themes come up often in the novella "Walt Kaplan is Broke." Relying on some history from earlier stories, the novella takes place in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1977. Walter Kaplan has bypassed death by cardiac arrest, leaving him to evaluate his whole life, marriage, friendships, and the history of the town itself. Walt has been a business failure, and was depressed before he nearly died. When he wakes up, he has to find his place among the living.
Orner has the ability to give a skeleton of details about a character's life and trust that the reader can fill in the gaps and leap from story to story to understand an overarching message about our pasts. It's a rare talent and these stories are its evidence.
gh7's review against another edition
3.0
In one of his stories, the author has his narrator say this: "Horizons can't ever be reached no matter how many words you lard on a novel. The attempt at closure is inherently dishonest."
That's true but the magic of every brilliant novel is that it creates the illusion in time that it isn't true. So, there's something a bit shifty about this declaration, especially as it's the impetus for the abbreviated form of the countless stories in this volume. Few stories are more than a couple of pages long. Isolated moments in a life, often at a point where the life in question stalled.
Recently I read a number of unfinished stories by Katherine Mansfield. They too were like snapshots of stories. And they were unfinished because she never quite found the inspiration to complete them. There's often the feeling a similar problem was besetting Peter Orner. He can write very well and there's some fabulous one-liners. And had this book consisted of only the first hundred or so pages I would have found it interesting as an experiment. But over 300 pages of these two-page stories began to seem like obstinate self-indulgence, a writer trying to fight his way out of writer's block. And his subject, the stalled life, often seemed like a mirror image of his own dilemma as a (stalled) writer.
I was excited to see there was a novella towards the end of this book. I assumed I'd now be privy to what he can do with an extended narrative. What ensued was pretty much the same technique extended with the same characters which bored me to the point of abandoning it half way. This was a buddy read with Elyse who enjoyed it more than I did - no doubt helped by her greater familiarity with the locations and social milieus - this is a very esoterically American book. There's enough here to make me curious about what he might do with a novel but these attempts to find a new form for the short story made me think of an architect designing countless porticos bereft of any complimentary building.
That's true but the magic of every brilliant novel is that it creates the illusion in time that it isn't true. So, there's something a bit shifty about this declaration, especially as it's the impetus for the abbreviated form of the countless stories in this volume. Few stories are more than a couple of pages long. Isolated moments in a life, often at a point where the life in question stalled.
Recently I read a number of unfinished stories by Katherine Mansfield. They too were like snapshots of stories. And they were unfinished because she never quite found the inspiration to complete them. There's often the feeling a similar problem was besetting Peter Orner. He can write very well and there's some fabulous one-liners. And had this book consisted of only the first hundred or so pages I would have found it interesting as an experiment. But over 300 pages of these two-page stories began to seem like obstinate self-indulgence, a writer trying to fight his way out of writer's block. And his subject, the stalled life, often seemed like a mirror image of his own dilemma as a (stalled) writer.
I was excited to see there was a novella towards the end of this book. I assumed I'd now be privy to what he can do with an extended narrative. What ensued was pretty much the same technique extended with the same characters which bored me to the point of abandoning it half way. This was a buddy read with Elyse who enjoyed it more than I did - no doubt helped by her greater familiarity with the locations and social milieus - this is a very esoterically American book. There's enough here to make me curious about what he might do with a novel but these attempts to find a new form for the short story made me think of an architect designing countless porticos bereft of any complimentary building.
rakesprogress's review
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
abookishmagpie's review
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
I am gonna keep this short. Writing was decent, had a few quite moving passages, but overall this was just not for me. It is a collection of short stories and a novella that are all loosely connected by towns or some characters that are repeated, but other than that I was not able to really make the connections. I am sure this book is exactly what some people would love, but I just felt like I was completely missing the point and it was all going over my head. I don't want to trash this or rate it too low. But at the same time my reading experience with it just wasn't great so I want to be honest.
maggie1111's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
This book sucked so bad
shelleygee's review
4.0
Man, Orner can infuse the briefest of moments with beauty and sadness and grace.
expendablemudge's review
5.0
Real Rating: 4.5* of five
All the stars, all the stripes, all the band fanfares for Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella! The Chicago stuff, Lighted Windows, not so much; the thematic unity there was love, looking for love, running into it without meaning to, and that's pretty much why short stories get a bad rap from most folks because, in the end, who friggin cares.
Renters: A Sequence was affecting as a group of minor stories, cohesive in their central theme of exploring the disaster and misery of a marriage foundering under the skyscraper-tall waves of mental illness; the issue for me, the reason it wasn't as rock-me-back beautiful as Walt Kaplan was, was that the characters were sketched in thin, spidery lines instead of bold, dark strokes.
The Cali stuff, Come Back to California, was okay, I guess, but not excellent the way the Fall River, Mass, Jews in Castaways were. Startlingly rich and layered characterizations in quite compact stories, so compact as to be fleeting in some cases. The best single story in the book is in this section: "Bernard: A Character Study" was a peak read for me, a simple and direct evocation of a simple and direct person's time on this Earth.
The micro-ness of the fictions works best in the novella. They are a perfect meal made of tapas, orchestrated to present a dozen views of the tale; they each have a flavor impact outsized to their physical page presence, but contribute their unique qualities to a whole and satisfying conclusion to one's story hunger:
It's to your taste, or it isn't; but it *is* beautiful.
All the stars, all the stripes, all the band fanfares for Walt Kaplan is Broke: A Novella! The Chicago stuff, Lighted Windows, not so much; the thematic unity there was love, looking for love, running into it without meaning to, and that's pretty much why short stories get a bad rap from most folks because, in the end, who friggin cares.
Renters: A Sequence was affecting as a group of minor stories, cohesive in their central theme of exploring the disaster and misery of a marriage foundering under the skyscraper-tall waves of mental illness; the issue for me, the reason it wasn't as rock-me-back beautiful as Walt Kaplan was, was that the characters were sketched in thin, spidery lines instead of bold, dark strokes.
The Cali stuff, Come Back to California, was okay, I guess, but not excellent the way the Fall River, Mass, Jews in Castaways were. Startlingly rich and layered characterizations in quite compact stories, so compact as to be fleeting in some cases. The best single story in the book is in this section: "Bernard: A Character Study" was a peak read for me, a simple and direct evocation of a simple and direct person's time on this Earth.
The micro-ness of the fictions works best in the novella. They are a perfect meal made of tapas, orchestrated to present a dozen views of the tale; they each have a flavor impact outsized to their physical page presence, but contribute their unique qualities to a whole and satisfying conclusion to one's story hunger:
And think of the '60s, when the whole country got a little wilder and we joined in and did it twice a night? You remember, Sar? Now twice a night would be like rising from the dead, but history is history, and if not set down on paper it should at least be ruminated upon. Sarah and Walt Kaplan, one night, more than once, two entirely separate fornications.
Now, for a philosophical as well as a practical question: Why didn't we just push the beds together and leave them there? Ah, because that would be a lie, no? The nature of the reaching, the nature of the whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both reaching of the hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good, am I right or am I right? Spell it out again: the retreat once again to separate beds attains a cementation that precludes any further you wannas. After a certain point you wanna? is no longer an invitation for rumpus; it's a cry from oblivion.
It's to your taste, or it isn't; but it *is* beautiful.
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