Reviews

Kirkus

HERE BENEATH LOW-FLYING PLANES BY MERRILL FEITELL • RELEASE DATE: OCT. 1, 2004

Altogether, a talented newcomer, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Eight stories in a first collection, lightened by buoyant wit.

In “Such a Big Mr. England,” a new grandfather regrets that his son and daughter-in-law have chosen the day of Princess Diana’s funeral to bring his new granddaughter from California to visit: He’s getting phone calls from friends, who consider him an authority on the royal family, and this brings him greater satisfaction than being grandpa of “an ugly baby.” His daughter-in-law displays her own resentments in a not-so-subtle manner. The swiftly moving “Bike New York!” finds Derek, 30, the weekend before his wedding, failing to meet buddies for a 42-mile trek through New York City. Instead, he rides with a high-school junior named Serena, who leads him off-track to her parents’ bakery, shows him catalogues of wedding cakes and her own portfolio of photographs, and leaves him with a shimmering memory “as he slipped from the point of focus in his own life.” “The Marrying Kind” brings an awkward situation—a woman who has had a last fling with a former boyfriend arrives at his wedding knowing she’s pregnant with his child—to a not entirely satisfying end, and “Our Little Lone Star,” about a woman of 62 driving west during tornado warnings, has too-pat a wrap-up. The title piece presents an ensemble of voices—Janie, just home with her first baby; her husband, Jeff; best friend Hazel, and her baby brother, T.J., who’s also Hazel’s lover—all reflecting on love and marriage. This time, Feitell accomplishes a splashy close that pulls everything together: “Above the beach the small plane chugs and tilts, the underbelly catching a ray of sun and zapping it toward Manhattan, toward Jersey, Ohio, California. . . . [There] is a moment of weightless stall. Think of it! That one moment! Where is the time for indecision? Here on earth, beneath low-flying planes, there are birthdays, and bike rides, feet slipping into shoes.”Altogether, a talented newcomer, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004 ISBN: 0-87745-911-8 Page Count: 152

Publisher: Univ. of Iowa

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004

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New York Times Book Review

SHORT STORIES

CHRONICLE SHORT STORIES: Short Stories: Squeeze Plays

By Maggie Galehouse, Feb. 20, 2005

YOU ARE NOT THE ONE Stories. By Vestal McIntyre. Carroll & Graf, paper, $13.95.

CALAMITY And Other Stories. By Daphne Kalotay. Doubleday, $19.95.

HERE BENEATH LOW-FLYING PLANES By Merrill Feitell. University of Iowa, paper, $15.95.

THIS IS A VOICE FROM YOUR PAST New and Selected Stories. By Merrill Joan Gerber. Ontario Review, $23.95.

IN an age of split-second access to unlimited information, a short story is wonderfully finite: the end is always in sight. Yet the best short stories aren’t short on story at all. Instead, they manage to fit an unwieldy world into a very small space. The trick for the writer is to hide the muscle it takes to pull off that compression, convincing us that the world on the page spins easily beyond the story’s boundaries.

In You Are Not the One, Vestal McIntyre builds arresting, elegant fiction around situations that while often unlikely are not at all inconceivable. Most of his characters are social outcasts confronting their own brands of unbelonging: the boy in “Octo” who struggles to keep a pet octopus that has grown too large for its tank; the teenager in a kangaroo suit in “Sahara” who’s kidnapped after being mistaken for a high-school mascot. McIn-tyre’s stories can be funny, but in a scary, manic Augusten Burroughs kind of way. And when they aren’t — when they focus on something as unexpected as a high school student who sets out to read “Moby-Dick” to a cousin with Down syndrome — they’re crushingly sweet.

Daphne Kalotay’s collection of linked stories, Calamity: And Other Stories, visits three women over more than two decades. At 40, Annie is a sexy graduate student, back in bed with her ex-husband; in her 60’s, she’s a frizzy-haired feminist with sagging breasts and a not very exciting philosophy professorship. Her friend Eileen buries a young husband, reclaims her health and raises a son. Rhea is first seen as a girl, catching her mother impulsively kissing another woman; in one of Rhea’s parting shots, she’s pessimistically bracing for an emergency landing on an airplane. Kalotay’s collection builds force so quietly that when all the characters appear together in the final story you’re stunned — by how well it works and by how familiar these women now feel.

Merrill Feitell takes on the troubles of young, educated urban adults in Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes. Her characters are usually in the midst of awkward transitions: a woman, pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s baby, attends his wedding to someone else; a new mother, irritated by her husband’s neediness, craves a bit of her pre-mom life. Feitell also has a knack for the odd, beautiful image. In a story called “And Then You Stand Up,” a woman with a maze of scars on her face starts to cry: “The first few tears traveled left across the web, then diagonally down, and then right. When those deepest lines filled, they overflowed to shallower scars, until the rivulets traversed in all ways the jagged ruts of her face. She often wondered if the scars would grow deeper, like the Grand Canyon, salt and motion eroding the left side of her to the bone.”

The new and selected stories in This Is a Voice From Your Past don’t reach for tidy endings or moments of insight. Instead, Merrill Joan Gerber bravely presents tales that are as disturbingly inconclusive as real life. Often, she captures characters whose lives have been interrupted by an ordinary-seeming glitch — a mother exerting too much control after her daughter’s baby is born; a neighbor becoming increasingly annoyed by the incessant barking of the dogs next door — and then sticks around to see how they handle it. In “Honeymoon,” a restless 19-year-old bride leaves her middle-aged husband at a Las Vegas casino and tries to hook up with a young couple at Hoover Dam. When the couple vanish, the newlywed just gets back on the tour bus, cursing her luck and studying her wedding picture.

Publisher’s Weekly

Feitell chronicles impulsive life decisions, crucial moments of self-reflection, lost loves and intimate connections in her skillful debut, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction award. In “Bike New York!” an uncertain groom-to-be half-mistakenly flakes on his friends’ planned bike-a-thon/pub crawl/bachelor party, only to find himself peddling along with a teenage girl whose hopeful youth sparks a “shift in lighting, a re-alignment of compositions as he slipped from the point of focus in his own life.” In the poignant “The Marrying Kind,” a woman on the eve of her 33rd birthday endures the nuptials of her college love—who also happens to be the father of her unborn child. The gem here is the delightful “Our Little Lone Star,” in which a slightly neurotic 62-year-old woman’s encounter with “some kind of cowboy” inspires her to stop living a life of regret. There are some slight missteps: the familiar Thanksgiving meet-the-parents theme and a few heavy-handed metaphors weaken “It Couldn’t Be More Beautiful,” while “Such a Big Mr. England” relies too heavily on its frame of Princess Diana’s death at the cost of developing more fully the character of a memorabilia collector watching his son slip away to a cold daughter-in-law. But the collection as a whole boasts confident, astute prose as Feitell explores life’s surprising moments with generosity and truth. (Oct.)