Good Trouble

March 1, 2018

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Netherland and most recently the Man Booker long-listed The Dog, O'Neill shows us characters undone by contemporary life. Two poets wonder whether they should participate in a "pardon Edward Snowden" verse petition, for instance, while a hopeful New York co-op buyer can't secure a character reference.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2018

In his typically sharp, smart language, the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Netherland shows us characters undone by contemporary life, not grandly but in the small, essential ways that define our culture. When poet Mark McCain receives a request from another, younger poet to sign a "poetition"--a petition cum poem asking President Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, he's outraged at the misunderstanding of what poetry really is and, in the story's brief, reflective passages, explains its meaning before vowing "Never give in"--to philistinism of every stripe. A professor who cannot find a way to persuade an oblivious former student to cease his yearly visits finds the problem finally solving itself, even as he and his wife entertain each other with titles for memoirs of the fancy life they haven't led. Deserted by an in-second-childhood husband who says she's not passionate and a tetchy son who's banned her from his own family for being too distant--she was trying not to intrude on a conjugal fight--fiftyish Breda makes tentative steps toward liberating herself. VERDICT Absorbing reading sophisticates will love. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2018
In 11 stories, the author of Netherland (2008) looks at crises, fads, and conundrums among the aging denizens of 21st-century New York.With six of these stories first appearing in either the New Yorker or Harper's, it's clear that O'Neill (The Dog, 2014, etc.) produces well-made, fairly mainstream short fiction. He probes the frictions that make marriages and families fissure or fight for survival, the situations where discomfort breeds anxiety and resentment mushrooms into malaise. A poet who's asked to sign a "poetician" for the pardon of Edward Snowden bemoans Bob Dylan's Nobel and in his chagrin seems to break out of his writer's block. The retired teachers in "The Trusted Traveler" accept the "strangely fictional few hours" when a former student joins them for dinner once a year, enduring this time a recitation of his troubles with a sperm bank. An awkward visit to a fertility clinic in "Ponchos" punctuates a man's ruminations as they swivel between a marriage strained by two years of trying to conceive and the buddy chat of three fellow stool perchers at a diner. There's often a subversive, comic element in O'Neill's writing. "The World of Cheese" centers on a rancorous dispute between a woman and her son over his child's circumcision, but the narrative also notes the father's new infatuation with cheese, including a "cheesing trip to Ireland." With a faux academic tone ("Social historians will record"), the narrator in "The Mustache in 2010" moves from a survey of facial hair to a man's peculiar shaving habits to recalling a contretemps seven years earlier between two people at a charity auction and then finds herself crying even as she tries to parse "the state of the upper-middle-class adventure" objectively: "I'm brushing tears from my eyes, it should be documented."A thoroughly enjoyable collection in which O'Neill treats his characters with a wry sympathy and a sense of fun.

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April 2, 2018
In his first story collection, O’Neill (The Dog; Netherland) tackles the politics of friendship, facial hair, petitions, and spousal duties, with solid results. In “The Sinking of the Houston,” a father uses GPS tracking to hunt down his son’s stolen cell phone, only to be distracted in his pursuits by an elderly neighbor’s stories of the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Goose” sees a man hopscotch across Italy before attending his college friend’s second wedding. In “The Death of Billy Joel,” a quartet of golfing buddies head to Florida for a weekend of celebration, only to ultimately question the value of travel and escapism. O’Neill’s narratives frequently wander between ideas and end without definitive resolution. When this works, as in “The Mustache in 2010”—a tale of shaving, social history, and mindfulness—the reader is delightfully tossed about. Yet other stories, such as “The Trusted Traveler,” concerning a former student who visits his professor’s home once a year, never quite achieve deep resonance and sputter in their final acts. O’Neill’s writing is always inventive, and despite occasional missteps, the collection will please fans of quirky short fiction.

May 1, 2018
O'Neill's (The Dog, 2014) collection consists of beautifully crafted short stories written during the last decade. Here, as in his novels, he dissects the granular details of contemporary social mores while global issues flicker in and out of focus. In the opener, Pardon Edward Snowden, a poet is asked in an email to sign a document in support of Snowden's cause. The tragicomic story gently mocks the poet's neuroses as well as academia (which is also skewered to wonderful effect in Ponchos ), and as he agonizes over what to do, the purpose of the request and the 2016 political context are lost. This tale sets the tone, as each subsequent story explores peculiarly modern forms of disquietude. For instance, in the gloriously Kafkaesque The Referees, a recent divorc�e has to find two references to move into a co-op. Promises Promises is dedicated to the late David Foster Wallace, and, indeed, O'Neill's tales often echo Wallace's mixture of humor and profundity, demonstrating a similar, almost preternatural eye for the absurdities of contemporary life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)