A review by gh7
Maggie Brown & Others: Stories by Peter Orner
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.