Ladies and Gentlemen

April 25, 2011
This competent if unspectacular collection from Mr. Peanut author Ross lacks a standout, with each tale only fitfully coming alive, usually when the plot turns cruel. In "Futures," an unemployed man goes for a series of progressively stranger job interviews while also coming to the aid of a neighbor, both to crushing results. In "The Rest of It," a maintenance man's story of a crazy night out leaves an academic with a moral quandary and an excuse to speak to his ex-wife. "When in Rome" is a mini-epic of betrayal, and "Ladies and Gentlemen" is the story of a married woman flying cross-country to meet a man "she'd kissed in college nearly two decades ago." "In the Basement," the most memorable of these dark pieces, is an existential horror story triggered by a Christmas card. There are crisp turns of phraseâa character in "Futures" likens his walking around with a fat wad of cash in his pocket to "how a camel must feel about his hump"âand some memorable images, but the stories tend to ramble and too often depend on long stretches of characters talking or reminiscing to advance plots. While Ross is clearly talented, the short story isn't his métier.

Starred review from May 1, 2011

Following his dazzling debut, Ross drops seven more doses of disquieting fears and misleading hopes.

Having established his penchant for head-turning narrative architecture in his much-lauded first novel, Ross (Mr. Peanut, 2010) wrings bleakly funny, if somewhat panicky moments out of this fierce collection of short stories. The opener, "Futures," drills straight down into the collective discomfort of the American middle class. A man dressed in his best suit tries desperately to hide his anxiety moments before a job interview, fantasizing that his interviewer might just be an attractive woman with a job offer to save his life. His cynicism is tempered, a little, by his affection for his neighbor and her troubled son. But as with most things in America, the wish granted is a far cry from the wish envisioned. In "The Rest of It," a small-minded professor's run-in with an aggressive maintenance man turns his thoughts to the human condition. "Because the world seemed too wide, its fortunes too random, and its blessings too fleeting to honor one man's bravery—or to punish his cowardice," Ross writes. A remembered tale of college hijinks ends with an awful blow in "The Suicide Room," while "When In Rome" details the consequences of a long-standing rivalry between two brothers, one a citizen of sorts and the other your basic lowlife. One of Ross' great strengths is walking that eternally fine line between showing the reader things—a bloody fistfight between brothers, or a Twilight Zone-esque reveal—and the heartbeat monitoring of a character's internal life. The latter comes into play in the finely honed title story, in which a traveling freelance writer weighs a life-changing moment against the stories she might tell a stranger someday about that very decision. In those moments, these characters are either untethered by their own vividness or weighed down with all the trouble in the world. In either case, it's impossible to look away.

A fine collection of stories.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011

In these seven strong stories by Ross (Mr. Peanut), betrayal is a constant theme. A successful man makes peace with his troubled brother but is drawn into a scam. Twenty years after a kiss in an abandoned observatory, a woman contemplates adultery. College students fabricate life stories, pursue each other's lovers, and take increasingly dangerous risks, and an isolated professor is trapped into concealing a crime. In other stories, the narrators meticulously work themselves into strange circumstances. A desperate man submits to bizarre job interviews, despite not knowing the nature of the job. A beautiful, erratic woman keeps a dog locked in the basement, and a boy leverages his job as a voice-over actor into an opportunity finally to kiss an older girl. The author is good at creating unease and suspense in each tale, although the reader can sometimes predict the twist. VERDICT A fast-moving collection ideal for contemporary fiction and short story readers.--John R. Cecil, Austin, TX

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011
Ross brings the bleak, bitingly funny style of his lauded first novel, Mr. Peanut (2010), to the seven short stories in this collection. Ross limns the ills of contemporary Americans, so vividly rendering their problems and anxieties that the effect is unnerving and heartbreaking. In Futures, 43-year-old, unemployed David Appletow imagines that a prospective job interview will completely change his fortunes, making the cruel outcome even harder to accept. In The Rest of It, the wild stories of a maintenance man, who claims to be hiding a hit man at his house, throw a ne'er-do-well English professor into a panic. He contacts his ex-wife for advice but is brought even lower by the realization that her new life had wiped their old one out. And in When in Rome, two brothers carrying emotional baggage from their childhood engage in an ultraviolent fistfight that only serves to escalate their sibling rivalry. It is the precision of Ross' dark and dazzling prose, often laced with a touch of the surreal, that generates the stories' intensity and makes them so disquieting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)