Review by Booklist Review
A new collection of stories by critically lauded Bausch, a celebrated master of the form, is cause for celebration. His latest volume delivers the piercing character studies and musical prose that readers have come to expect. In the opening story, a 12-year-old boy meets Ernest Hemingway in a Cuban diner and senses the great author's inner turmoil. In other tales, a man stumbles upon the aftermath of a gruesome accident and is haunted by a looming sense of doom. Marie and Darcey, married women who move in with Marie's estranged father during the pandemic, soon face tragedy. Bausch explores these shades of mortality, skillfully sketching portraits of courage and healing. He is equally adept at depicting the humor and trauma of family dynamics. Newlyweds Billy and Michelle are visited by Michelle's charismatic father, a famous poet, while another story features a middle-aged couple who console their newly divorced daughter after she returns home with a lucrative divorce settlement. The characters' emotions are palpable and visceral. Throughout this strong collection, Bausch sensitively portrays the human condition in all its richly diverse manifestations.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bausch (Playhouse) delivers a wondrous collection of stories about the tempestuous lives of ordinary people. The narrator of "In That Time" reminisces about his trip to Cuba in 1949 with his widowed father and his father's new wife. After his parents send him away during one of their arguments, he shares a meal with Ernest Hemingway, who unexpectedly takes him seriously. In the title story, English professor and lapsed writer Billy Jordan hosts his father-in-law, famous poet Thomas Fearing, for a reading at his university. After the event, Billy barhops with Thomas and feels guilty for encouraging the older man's drunken antics. "Donnaiolo," titled after an Italian word for womanizer, follows an American woman who moves back in with her parents after a brief marriage to an Italian man whom Italian authorities are trying to extradite from the U.S. for statutory rape. In "The Long Consequence," a couple's 22-year-old son gets drunk after his girlfriend leaves him and crashes his car into a neighbor's house. In the aftermath, his parents fight over whether he deserves their forgiveness. The spectacular closer, "Broken House," finds a group of lifelong friends looking back on a life-changing incident that occurred when they were altar boys in the 1960s. In each entry, Bausch exhibits a mastery of cringe-inducing and sometimes heartbreaking miscommunication, as his characters talk to each other at cross-purposes. These insightful stories pack a punch. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A strong collection by a veteran master of the short story. Though Bausch has become a prolific novelist, his story collections are more than publishing stopgaps between longer works. Particularly this one, filled with fiction that is richly imagined, deeply felt, and filled with the sort of context that distinguishes it from minimalism. The "fate" of the title seems to be the one that awaits us all, as death--or the risk or fear of it--permeates these stories. So does literature, and there are many writers featured here--including Ernest Hemingway, in the opening "In That Time"--along with lovers of fiction and creative artists in other fields. Yet art doesn't really help Bausch's characters come to terms with the inevitable, or with the unexpected, the sort of out-of-the-blue crises around which so many of these stories pivot. Covid-19, politics, and religion serve to complicate some of the plots, but mainly the tales seem to focus on "How did we get here?" and "Where do we go from here?" In "Isolation," a woman is quarantined with the husband she still loves, separated from the lover with whom she'd never intended to become involved. In "Forensics," a "murder scene involving hoarders in a decaying old house" shows a detective the depths of depression into which he's sunk. In the novella-length "Broken House" that closes the volume, another house in disrepair presents a lasting memory and metaphor for the narrator, a retired history professor who once contemplated becoming a priest but has since found his faith shaken. "A Memory, and Sorrow (An Interval)" reads like a rare foray into autofiction, but every one of these stories serves to render lives fully experienced. Classic craftsmanship meets contemporary shell-shock. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
