Things You Should Know: a review
Reviewing collections of short stories always strikes me as a profoundly unfair way to approach the form. 99% of the time, short stories are organically complete unto themselves, not designed to be read as a segment of a collection. I always find it hard to review or discuss a collection as a book in its own right.
That disclaimer out of the way, short story collections are the marketable media we've cultivated to get short fiction writers out there in the world. So review I shall.
A.M. Homes is infinitely more suited to the short form than the long form. Her terse, caustic wit, paired with her amazing capacity for empathy can sustain short work. In long work she invariably succumbs to the contrasting poles of Sentimentality or Scorn (compare the overly sweet Jack to the mean-spirited Music for Torching), and you're left with very little either way. She's first and foremost a humorist; her best work pairs the absurd with the sad, the ridiculous with the lonely. Her adults invariably behave and speak like children, and in this flattened out and almost cartoonish moral landscape, Homes is free to explore the naked desires and confusions of the contemporary setting.
Things You Should Know is a collection that has upped the stakes from Homes' previous work; the author seems to have turned her gaze towards questions of identity in a world of landslides (figurative and literal). Whether we peer through a shapeshifting coyote's eyes at a Californian teenager dieting herself to oblivion, or follow Nancy Reagan on the tightrope between anonymity and celebrity while dealing with her husband's illness, Homes explores the liminal spaces of selfhood. The best of the stories here are restrained and unadorned, leaving the reader room to negotiate the moral and ethical obstacles established everywhere we go.
There are a few stories here that feel like toss-offs (especially compared to the really outstanding stories nestled right next to them). Again, here's that problem I refer to above; the collection as a whole feels uneven, but some of the individual stories are quite brilliant.
I'm a style junkie, and Homes' deliberate spareness gives me little to revel in from a prose standpoint. That said, in the stripped-down texture of her writing, other elements of her work shine: mind and eye are more important than tongue here. At their best, these stories are hilarious, heartbreaking, and amazingly clever.
That disclaimer out of the way, short story collections are the marketable media we've cultivated to get short fiction writers out there in the world. So review I shall.
A.M. Homes is infinitely more suited to the short form than the long form. Her terse, caustic wit, paired with her amazing capacity for empathy can sustain short work. In long work she invariably succumbs to the contrasting poles of Sentimentality or Scorn (compare the overly sweet Jack to the mean-spirited Music for Torching), and you're left with very little either way. She's first and foremost a humorist; her best work pairs the absurd with the sad, the ridiculous with the lonely. Her adults invariably behave and speak like children, and in this flattened out and almost cartoonish moral landscape, Homes is free to explore the naked desires and confusions of the contemporary setting.
Things You Should Know is a collection that has upped the stakes from Homes' previous work; the author seems to have turned her gaze towards questions of identity in a world of landslides (figurative and literal). Whether we peer through a shapeshifting coyote's eyes at a Californian teenager dieting herself to oblivion, or follow Nancy Reagan on the tightrope between anonymity and celebrity while dealing with her husband's illness, Homes explores the liminal spaces of selfhood. The best of the stories here are restrained and unadorned, leaving the reader room to negotiate the moral and ethical obstacles established everywhere we go.
There are a few stories here that feel like toss-offs (especially compared to the really outstanding stories nestled right next to them). Again, here's that problem I refer to above; the collection as a whole feels uneven, but some of the individual stories are quite brilliant.
I'm a style junkie, and Homes' deliberate spareness gives me little to revel in from a prose standpoint. That said, in the stripped-down texture of her writing, other elements of her work shine: mind and eye are more important than tongue here. At their best, these stories are hilarious, heartbreaking, and amazingly clever.