- Paperback: 215 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins Canada / Non-Fiction; Reprint edition (April 10 1992)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0060974877
- ISBN-13: 978-0060974879
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.5 x 1.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 159 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Nearly every page in this wonderful collection of stories offers a revelation about some aspect of human experience, often hilariously funny or, simply, brilliantly observed. In most of these 15 stories, DeMarinis ( The Year of the Zinc Penny ; Under The Wheat ) demonstrates that he can make the unlikliest of characters into fascinating protagonists. He can also capture the ineffably sweet quality of remembered childhood textures and issues without cloying sentimentality or nostalgic fog. While we encounter such eccentric folks as the manager of a trailer park who has secretly installed spy cameras in some of the units ("The Whitened Man"), a repo man who talks the language of Star Trek ("Aliens"), a man who seems to be haunted by lightning ("Insulation") and a writer who pens pseudonymous romance potboilers only to fall in love with the woman hired to pose as Veronica LaMonica at book signings ("God Bless America' and "Her Alabaster Skin"), it is in the characterizations of adolescent boys where DeMarinis particularly sparkles. In "Safe Forever," Charlie, the 11-year-old narrator, experiences VJ Day as the day when people on the street steal all his frozen treats and overturn his ice cream cart. But despite this and other losses, Charlie's optimistic sense of the trajectory of his own life is so pervasive that at the end of the story, when he has broken his arm and is being driven to the hospital, he imagines himself "in the Plexiglas nose of a B-29, on the one-way mission that would carry me into the rest of my life." Ravaged though they are by illness, drugs, poverty, ennui or general flakiness, DeMarinis's characters speak of possibilities and futures. Their voices are extraordinarily diverse, but they are all informed by DeMarinis's uniquely energetic and canny style.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Surely there is more to America than this. The first story, concerning a young boy on VJ Day, is termed a sequel to the novel Year of the Zinc Penny ( LJ 7/89) and echoes its theme of "mustering any necessary lie at will" to survive. The other stories, covering America since, deal with sickness, age, unemployment, disillusionment, and self-doubt vitiated by the "necessary" lies of drink, infidelity, television, and travel. The title story does do a good job of showing the American mind saturated by radio. The stories are well crafted, but DeMarinis often comes perilously close to didacticism. Yet the last two, "Her Alabaster Skin" and the intentional self-parody "Rudderless Fiction," are good signs that he is aware of his incipient self-repetition. An optional purchase.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic,
By Professor Joseph L. McCauley "Joseph L. McCauley" (Austria+Texas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Voice Of America (Hardcover)
Hard book to review, just read it! One of the best I've read, a Texan's Updike? No, better than Updike. His down and out characters are so real that I wonder if he didn't take case histories!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
An unexpected pleasure, well-written and sharply observed,
By James Carragher - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Voice of America: Stories (Paperback)
About a third of the these stories are set in the late forties (the first begins on VJ Day 1945) and fifties, while the rest are contemporary. Each Voice of America is male, often middle-aged, often eccentric, dystfunctional or, in a couple of cases, downright creepy. They generally exist at the margins of what passes for the American dream, a world of trailer parks, door to door salespeople, and road wanderers. DeMarinis is certainly not in the business of either transformation or redemption for these people and places. Still, through his eye for telling detail -- one character dreams of "places so familiar and yet so utterly lost that he would wake up with tears on his face, even though the places he dreamed about were nowhere he'd ever been" -- and true talk dialogue, more often than not these stories break through irony and malaise to hope. Among the best: "Paraiso: An Elegy," "Wilderness," the strange encounter of "Infidelity," and "The Voice of America." But my personal favorite is "Her Alabaster Skin," in which a romance novelist writing under the pseudonym Veronica Lamonica meets the woman hired to be Veronica at book store signings. All in all, an excellent read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic,
By Professor Joseph L. McCauley "Joseph L. McCauley" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Voice Of America (Hardcover)
Hard book to review, just read it! One of the best I've read, a Texan's Updike? No, better than Updike. His down and out characters are so real that I wonder if he didn't take case histories!
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