Don't Worry about the Kids: Stories

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Overview

Although the voices and settings of these tales are diverse, their central concerns remain constant. Neugeboren explores the precarious nature of family life and those elements - madness, betrayal, loss - that often shape and threaten it. He writes about the mysterious, sad, surprising, and sometimes beautiful ways in which love expresses itself. He reveals how our choices, large and small, inform and define our lives. Whether writing about a black American musician in Paris or a documentary filmmaker in Maine, ...
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Overview

Although the voices and settings of these tales are diverse, their central concerns remain constant. Neugeboren explores the precarious nature of family life and those elements - madness, betrayal, loss - that often shape and threaten it. He writes about the mysterious, sad, surprising, and sometimes beautiful ways in which love expresses itself. He reveals how our choices, large and small, inform and define our lives. Whether writing about a black American musician in Paris or a documentary filmmaker in Maine, about a boy grieving for the death of his father or parents for the loss of their children, about divorce or city life or basketball or mental illness, Neugeboren brings to his craft a profound knowledge of the heart's imperatives.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
The protagonists of these 15 stories by the talented Neugeboren are often divorced fathers fighting for custody of their children, Jewish men looking back on their boyhoods in Brooklyn, where they played basketball or football, and where their fathers were given to domestic violence and died young. The women in their lives tend to be either their cold and unmaternal mothers or their young, beautiful and sexually insatiable lovers. The specter of mental illness is always present. These are themes that Neugeboren has explored elsewhere, most recently in his haunting memoir Imagining Robert. Here his success is mixed. The best stories are the ones that break away from Neugeboren's conventional themes: "Connorsville, Virginia" is narrated by a young black man who has always accepted the South's racial bias until a murder during the civil rights agitations brings him into an ironic alliance with a white sheriff who needs to square his conscience. "The Year Between" is a subtle tale of a couple who act out what might be a Jamesian story, and a protagonist who understands belatedly that he has invited tragedy. The title story, with its supple weaving together of a rich palate of sensory and metaphorical images, the plangent lure of nostalgia and the gritty reality of New York streets, is packed with emotional resonance. Often, however, Neugeboren begins with an imaginative premise and intriguing characters and veers into melodrama. The CIA agent who coolly sends his daughter to her death in "What is the Good Life?" and the mean, promiscuous mother who abandons her son in "How I Became an Orphan in 1947" are never believable characters. Other stories are passionless and inert ("Leaving Brooklyn") or fundamentally implausible ("Your Child Has Been Towed"). Yet Neugeboren's compassionate understanding of people struggling to live decently, love well and find moral certainties embues them all with sincerity and, sometimes, power. (Oct. )
Kirkus Reviews
Fifteen polished stories by the veteran author of, most recently, a deeply felt memoir of his brother, Imagining Robert (1997).

In the title piece, a surgeon named Michael has a cup of coffee with the man appointed by the court to investigate his broken marriage and determine custody arrangements. Neugeboren cunningly orders things so that, at first, the reader sympathizes with Michael, then slowly comes to realize that he's been a bit of a monster. The same persona—a smart, professional, newly divorced man—appears several times here. In "Tolstoy in Maine," a highly successful filmmaker is hiding from himself in a seacoast town. He, too, has recently gone through a divorce, and misses his kids, and feels his ex-wife lied about him. In the town, he meets a beautiful divorcée who draws him out and loves him tenderly, only to disappear in the morning. Then Neugeboren offers her story, too, and the pathos of her disappearance turns romantic—and hopeful. He also takes romance about as far as a realistic writer can in the imaginative "What Is the Good Life?," a spy story set in France. Neugeboren reflects on Grace Kelly both as an actress and a princess in the voice of a Grace Kellylike character who's killed by an assassin after an impossibly romantic love affair. The amusing "In Memory of Jane Fogarty" concerns a psychiatrist who receives half a million dollars in insurance money when a patient of hers dies in a plane crash. The patient named her as sole beneficiary, but his parents are having none of it. A court battle is about to ensue, making the reader wonder who's crazier: the dead man, or all the people fighting for his money?

Neugeboren's sensibilities are exclusively northeastern and upper-middle class, which probably describes his readers as well. This time, he gives them their money's worth, and then some.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781558491137
  • Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
  • Publication date: 11/1/1997
  • Pages: 178
  • Product dimensions: 5.86 (w) x 9.26 (h) x 0.84 (d)

Table of Contents

Don't Worry about the Kids 1
Workers to Attention Please 21
The St. Dominick's Game 25
Romeo and Julio 43
Leaving Brooklyn 47
How I Became an Orphan in 1947 59
Minor Sixths, Diminished Sevenths 64
Fixer's Home 73
Department of Athletics 79
Connorsville, Virginia 85
The Year Between 99
Your Child Has Been Towed 112
What Is the Good Life? 124
In Memory of Jane Fogarty 144
Tolstoy in Maine 163
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