Remote Feed: Stories

A collection of original and witty stories includes "Anaconda Wrap," about a movie executive whose film about the Donner party is a flop, and two stories, "Remote Feed" and "Still in Motion," both set in the Galapagos Islands

The alcoholic CNN news crew in the title story of this promising but ultimately unmoving debut have reached the far side of cynicism. "Stuck in the midlife crisis of the seventh drink" and worn out by a recent stint in Bosnia, one member of the crew sums up the TV news industry: "You can't believe what you see.... Instead, you turn it into fiction with well-done special effects." That statement applies equally well to many of the stories in this curiously undeveloped collection. The characters are overeducated, undersatisfied, self-aware; they often act as if they're writing the novel of their lives (and looking to sell the movie rights) more than actually living them. In "Anaconda Wrap," for example, a one-flop-too-many movie producer flees California in his Porsche and heads for Montana, only to find himself living out a farcical, 1990s version of his own private John Wayne myth. Individually, these stories are acerbic and entertaining. As a group, however, they diminish each other, sharing a tendency to end suddenly, unsatisfyingly, just when the characters' lives have begun to matter to the reader. This is the curse of many contemporary short-story collections?an engaging narrative voice taking precedence over a fully developed story arc. Still, given Gilbert's obvious talent, readers can hope that the pieces will start coming together very soon. (Apr.) FYI: Gilbert is completing a novel to be published by Scribner in 1999.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The survival of the cynics--in an abrasively intelligent Darwinian debut collection. Gilbert's ten stories, framed by two that include the Galpagos Islands as a sometime setting, show us characters creeping and crawling along a bumpy course of moral evolution. Although they've reached a relatively advanced point as late- 20th-century humans, that achievement brings them little happiness. These highly evolved people, in fact, seem mostly corrupt, confused, or amusingly, consciously callous. Maybe they have to be like this--a barrelling fighter's instinct appears to be their main means of preservation and their last source of defense, and Gilbert's unsentimental probing of their chances is both raucous and searching. He's unafraid of ugliness, which lends his fiction realism and sardonic thrust. In ``Anaconda Wrap,'' for instance, the potentially clichd vignette of a has- been Hollywood producer's one-night stand with his assistant is redeemed, comically, not by true love but by the brio of a small yet brutish mishap: While selfishly lost in the throes of her passion, this cold, base young assistant accidentally breaks the bone in his finger. Another man caught in a midlife crisis (``At the Dj Vu'') concludes a hangover by throwing up underwater at a sunny island resort, then watches incredulously as multicolored fish (unavailable or uncooperative while he studiously snorkeled) arrive en masse to swallow his upchuck. But Gilbert's moral scale is more panoramic than just this, and he also writes persuasively about war's consequences, about the rude pragmatists who call themselves TV journalists, about the urge to kill, and about the difficulty of telling one's story--and being heard. Interplay between weary life-veterans and blameless or frightened neophytes gives much of his writing its zest. The subtle Darwinian thematic harmonies of the stories, suggesting Gilbert's promise as a novelist, also distinguish a book that gives this basic advice: ``Keep moving. Please keep moving. Just survive.'' To the cynics go the spoils. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Short stories are the X rays of literature. When they're good, and Gilbert's are outstanding, they penetrate the busy surface of everyday life right down to the level where everything writhes, breaks apart, and rejoins in new and troubling configurations. And this primal force, this chaos, bubbles inside each of Gilbert's superbly crafted tales. He uses the Galapagos Islands as a setting, referring offhandedly to the fits and starts of evolution. His children (marvelous creations) are aquiver with untamed emotion and eager sensation, and his adults (mirrors of us all) find themselves reacting wildly to fear and boredom alike. A skeptic at a suburban theme party runs across hot coals. Saul Messer, a movie producer, cracks under the pressure of his latest megaflop and takes to the highway. CNN reporters struggle for balance in Sarajevo after watching a zookeeper slaughter animals for food. The action in Gilbert's fast, witty, and unnerving stories is dark and edgy to be sure, but his prose gleams, a beacon in the fog of our numb days and nights. Donna Seaman