Maggie Brown & Others

Starred review from May 1, 2019
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.

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Starred review from May 27, 2019
“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.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)