Synopsis
Winner of the 1990 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
Spanning fourteen years, these interrelated stories are connected by the pasts of childhood friends Orion McClenahan and Helen Jowalski. A freak accident changes their lives forever; the stories are about the people Orion and Helen grow up to be, the people they love, and the people they lose along the way.
Reviews
"What do you do when you don't know what you want to do anymore?" asks Orion, a disenchanted photojournalist in "Peru," the first story in this impressive collection, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Many of McNally's characters are young adults searching for meaning in a world that has already left them disillusioned. "We spend our lives looking for signs--for thin, brief moments of direction," observes Ruth in "The Anonymity of Flight." Gradually the reader observes that the characters in the stories are connected--as siblings, childhood friends, ex-lovers. In "Jet Stream" Ruth and Betsy are teenagers in Phoenix; in "The Future of Ruth," Ruth is living with Orion. This interrelatedness sometimes frustrates attempts to locate a unifying perspective, and McNally's occasionally intellectualized commentary ("We can only know what we once didn't know") is distancing. But his prose is lean and powerful, and the brief scenes--strung together with little formal structure--effectively convey the desolation of lost dreams.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
McNally's first collection of 14 stories, winner of this year's Flannery O'Connor Award, leisurely patches together instances from the lives of two interrelated families and their small circle of friends who have been touched by an accidental death and by a great deal of drifting and aimlessness. Many of the stories, told by one character or another in brief snapshots, are so shapeless as to be almost incoherent; but when McNally's method is working, the reader becomes intimately acquainted with members of the McClenahan family, including Orion, a photojournalist who dreams of flying to Central America and making a difference; and of the Jowalski family, including Helen, who lost her brother Peter in a freak accident when he was electrocuted on a railroad track. McNally's modus operandi is the slice-of-life; often he juxtaposes one instance to flashbacks from another time. This method is most effective in ``Gun Law At Vermilion,'' in which Anna--once Orion's lover--visits her dying father; the piece movingly juxtaposes real life and the pulp westerns that Anna reads to her father and that dramatize her father's disappointment in her. Other tales (``The Anonymity of Flight''--Helen joins her ex-lover in Vermont for a weekend; ``Peru''--Orion intersperses Central America reminiscence with barroom conversation and crash-pad disorientation; and ``Breathing Is Key''--self-destructive Sarah, obsessed with the gasoline her mother once drank, stays with her abusive boyfriend) surprise with invention but fail finally to cohere, mirroring the plight of the characters: ``Lightning, gravity, love--I've never properly understood any of it.'' ``I'm not something from a myth!'' Helen says, and McNally insistently chops up his narratives--occasionally achieving aesthetic success--to make them reflect human uncertainty in the face of life's surprises. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This series of interconnected stories recently won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. While each story stands alone, each is also connected to the others. Together, they weave a loose history of the lives of characters Orion and Helen. The progress of these individuals through time is chronicled with brief and tantalizing glimpses at the events that shaped their lives. The overall tone is dark and moody, reflecting the tragedies of everyday life. Dialog and description are skillfully rendered. This is a fascinating storytelling technique. Recommended.
- Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Connecticut at Torrington Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
