Review by New York Times Review
THE STORIES IN PETER ORNER'S LATEST collection, like those in his previous two, are grouped into sections loosely organized around an era, theme or location, and vary widely in length. While at first I found myself flipping ahead, trying to get a handle on the size and scope of each new one, I soon gave in to the pleasure of not knowing how long the trip would be, experiencing a mild shock when (often sooner than later) its dense world ended and I was tipped into white space. Then another story would begin, set in Illinois or California or coastal Massachusetts, populated by a variety of characters: male, female; young, old. Whether a prisoner, a writer, a lawyer, a custodian, a grad student, a camp director or a salesman, all are intent on finding meaning in their lives, or on questioning its absence. There's a beautiful drifting quality to "Maggie Brown & Others," a sense of being invited inside a roving, kaleidoscopic mind - reluctant to generalize, tender, astute, with an eye for both comedy and heartache - and adopting its rhythms as your own. If Orner is bold in his embrace of unconventional narrative structures and organizing principles (there aren't a lot of Freytag's Pyramids here, and the connections between stories are often oblique), his work is also without pretense, powerfully aware of how difficult it is to capture experience on the page. His characters regularly muse on the act of storytelling, sometimes as writers or readers, but more often as plain-spoken, ordinary people, struggling to hide or reveal, bridge differences and resist glib formulations in the face of the serious threats posed by mortality, estrangement and the rush of time. "His voice cracked but he couldn't muster any words," Orner writes in "The Return." "How to even begin? How to stuff all the years into a few words? But wasn't this the frightening thing? You could. In two, three, four sentences, you could jam 14 years, easy." Elsewhere, the stories comment on the paucity of their own telling ("They were like similarly overweight leopards hunting alone - the image doesn't quite work, but the point is they were solitary predators"), but in a mild-mannered way, as if to say "Just do your best with what you've got." At times, some of the stories start to feel gloomily repetitive, rehashing failed marriages or love affairs. More interesting is the way Orner captures the power of flickering encounters that don't count as major milestones but persist in memory for what they have unleashed: a violent urge, a sharp regret, a renewed estrangement from or connection to the self. In the haunting title story, we read of the narrator's memories of his onetime lover, a young cellist named Maggie Brown, and of his college roommate, both long absent from his life. "You end up forgetting the people you shouldn't and remembering the people who've forgotten all about you," the narrator remarks. "For me what echoes, what reverberates, what I often relive and relive are those times that were cut short, times so fleeting they hardly even happened." Perhaps the collection's most powerful section is its final one, a wonderfully granular, funny yet also moving novella-instories set in Fall River, Mass. Here we encounter Walt Kaplan, a furniture salesman whom fans of Orner will remember from previous books. Now it's 1977, and Walt, 58, is in the Truesdale Hospital post-heart attack. He's aging too fast in a fading city where "the only Jews who stayed... were the ones who'd died and the ones waiting for the opportunity." Jumping around wildly in time, and with time's passage as its central concern, the novella builds a rich mosaic of Walt's life and of Fall River, a touchstone locale in Orner's work. "Walt Kaplan Is Broke" has the heft of a novel while allowing for the rough edges, gaps and echoes enabled by Orner's collagelike use of shorter forms. "If you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night," Orner writes in the memorable story "Ineffectual Tribute to Len," "your head would explode clean off your neck." "Lighted Windows" is the title of the collection's second section, but the phrase might apply to the whole book. Peter Orner is a wonderful guide, training our gaze from window to window, where we find reflections of ourselves even as we glimpse the inscrutable, captivating lives on the other side of the glass. Elizabeth graver's latest novel is "The End of the Point."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
I'd go and get my hair cut, I was so lonely for some fingers. There is something so ruthless about optimism. After they arrested the balloon lady, we bought our dope from a man who stood in a doorway on Howard Street dressed as Captain Kangaroo. Orner, the author of four previous books of fiction, is a master of the aphoristic short story. The 44 concise and stinging tales simmering here, along with a stunningly piquant novella, Walt Kaplan is Broke, express a full spectrum of caustic observations, nuanced emotions, and life-warping predicaments. Set in California, Chicago, upstate New York, and shabby Fall River, Massachusetts, Orner's poignant and hilarious stories feature fractious Jewish families, angry teens, marriages moribund and vital, estranged friends, and outright enemies besieged by madness, addiction, affairs, divorce, suicide, cancer, money worries, doubts, and lies. Orner writes with a heady blend of gravitas and wit similar to that of such kindred short-story virtuosos as Deborah Eisenberg, Andre Dubus, and Gina Berriault, while expressing his own edgy empathy and embrace of everyday absurdity. Each milieu reflects daunting social biases, while each of Orner's wise-cracking, cynical, brainy, secretive, yearning, and combative characters vividly embodies the grating contradictions and surprising depths of human nature.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I'm always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences," says the narrator of one of this collection's 44 powerful tales, expressing Orner's talent for crafting captivating character sketches that read like memoirs. Loosely linked by their shared settings (Chicago; Fall River, Mass.) and characters, the stories comprise a mosaic of lives remarkable primarily for an ordinariness-one character reflects that "his friends, his family, considered him a failure, he knew, not a spectacular failure, a mundane, run-of-the-mill failure"-that occasionally is thrown into sharp relief by a dramatic incident, such as a near car crash that reveals the narrator's true nature in "My Dead," or a young man's taunting, in the title story, of a disaffected roommate whom he doesn't know is carrying a gun. The final story, "Walt Kaplan Is Broke: A Novella," crystallizes the concerns of the stories that precede it in its account of a middle-aged Jewish businessman struggling to stay on top of what characters in another story think of as "a world with so little sense of order." Readers will sympathize with Orner's characters and identify with their all-too-human frailties. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In these 44 stories and a novella, Orner (Underground America, 2017, etc.) concentrates on small perceptual moments, especially those involving knotty problems in relationships.Orner's stories range from one paragraph to several pages, so he scarcely gives himself enough time to develop conflict and character. Instead, he focuses our attention on small epiphanies and suggests that these moments of insight, if they come, might be all we can expect in this circumscribed world. Orner tends to direct our attention to both domestic and family relationships, both of which are found wanting. In "Visions of Mr. Swibel," the narrator explains the communication strategy of his taciturn mother: "She didn't bother to speak to my father any more than absolutely necessary. Words were energy and she was storing them up for another life." A couple in therapy in "Rhinebeck" goes to a theater after their sessions and sits through any movie that happens to be playing, "all the way through the credits when there are no more names to thank and the whole deal stops....Anything not to go home." A tone of wistful and often comic nostalgia pervades many of the stories, for Orner has a sharp eye for absurdity and a discerning ear for dialogue. The narrator of "The Captain" finds himself "thinking about peripheral people in my life, people I hardly knew"people, in other words, like the title character, a drug dealer who dresses up like Captain Kangaroo. The longest piece here is Walt Kaplan Is Broke: A Novella, but even here Orner breaks his narrative into 30 chapters, using a small but recurring cast of characters in his microfictive world.Insightful, rueful, and often humorous, this collection holds a mirror to contemporary life and gives the reader much to reflect on. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
