The Mutual UFO Network

April 1, 2018
Quiet traumas and long-festering emotional wounds abound in this collection.Elucidating the tensions that can arise over a long period of intimacy, or that can emerge from an unspoken sense of resentment, can be a difficult thing to pull off in fiction. At their best, the stories in Martin's (Late One Night, 2016, etc.) collection offer an impressive demonstration of just how to convey these trying emotional states. Martin's stories frequently encompass decades' worth of events in the lives of their characters. Ancil and Lucy, the couple at the center of "The Last Civilized House," have been together for 55 years as the story opens. When Lucy reconnects with an old flame, there's a weight to the accumulation of events and a power that keeps the narrative unpredictable as secrets and resentments slowly come to the foreground. There's plenty of tension in these tightly wound connections between characters. The protagonist of "Bad Family," Lily Chang, recalls coming-of-age in China in the time of Chairman Mao. Since then, years have passed; she's now living in Nebraska, maintaining an unlikely bond with her ex-husband and his new wife. Her decision to begin sending anonymous, threatening letters to the couple complicates matters--but it also feels somewhat arbitrary, an unexpectedly violent act whose motives and consequences require more space to fully explore. But the best of these stories also showcase an impressive restraint: The narrator of the title story gives a detailed account of his bonds with each of his estranged parents, but passing allusions to certain events--one character's time in prison, for example--create an even grander sense of interconnection. Sudden moments of violence outnumber epiphanies in these stories, and the effect creates a quiet melancholy.With precise storytelling, Martin chronicles the unrest in his characters' lives and the shocking moments when tensions reach their breaking points.

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April 16, 2018
Martin (The Bright Forever) cleverly exposes the fractures between husbands and wives, family and friends, in these 12 excellent stories of people lying to themselves because the truth is too painful to admit. In “The Last Civilized House,” Ancil and Lucy live in a town full of people who hope others’ lives are worse than their own. In “White Dwarfs,” Frank’s wife mysteriously disappears, and clues indicate a crime, but it may be something else. The creepiest story is “Real Time,” in which a wife’s constant humiliation of her husband leads to a frightening encounter. In “Across the Street,” the best story, a man’s peculiar method of nighttime stargazing causes suspicious neighbors to reveal their true character. Other stories include a family ashamed and guilt-ridden for not speaking out about child abuse, two families ruined by philandering and a shotgun blast, and a married couple who finally understand that “our time together had started to feel like work.” Perhaps most memorable are the husbands and wives of these stories pretending to be happy and content on the surface, but simmering with resentment and disappointment underneath. This is a vivid, emotionally precise collection.

Starred review from May 15, 2018
Rage is difficult to capture in fiction, but Martin (Late One Night, 2016) builds a foundation of tension and anger beneath each short story in this collection. Rage stems from multiple points as three couples cope with one man's chemical imbalance. What seemed like a snuffed-out rage reemerges in one man's discovery of lone footprints around his quiet home, and he must once again confront his wife's decades-ago infidelity. Rage even turns up at a cinematic, Cassavetes-like wake, where a wayward daughter must confront her family at her father's funeral with two less-than-appropriate chaperones. Then there is the helpless rage of an adolescent boy whose small world violently collapses. Ranging in settings from suburban Dallas to rural southern Illinois, Martin's stories imbibe rage in a way that is both shocking and empathetic as he portrays characters who are at or near the end of some cataclysmic epiphany. Fueled by misperceptions and blind fury, they are virtually unidentified flying objects causing those around them to suffer or, hopefully, benefit when they finally comprehend the situation. Martin has written a not-to-be-missed masterwork of slow-burning emotions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)