Starred review from June 1, 2024
A dozen paired stories, thematically unified across decades and centuries. Echoing a song form popular in 18th-century New England, the second story in each pair deepens and clarifies the first. A painting of a bird left as a parting gift in 1796 ("Edwin Chase of Nantucket") turns up in a widow's attic more than 200 years later ("The Silver Clip"), yet in both it is a token of regret and loss. The Massachusetts apple orchard where Hope abandoned her baby in 1881 ("Graft") has been reduced by the 21st century to "a few grizzly old apple trees" on a property owned by a couple desperate to help their son, lost to drug addiction ("Tundra Swan"). A mysterious 1991 photo of a bird presumed to be extinct prompts a podcast episode 30 years later in "Radiolab: 'Singularities, '" but in "The Auk" we learn that it is a husband's poignant tribute to his dying wife. This particular pair is the only one that presents an explicit explanation of a mystery posed by the first tale; the unsettling duos of "August in the Forest"/"The Journal of Thomas Thurber" and "The Children of the New Eden"/"Introduction to The Dietzens..." are more typical in evoking a sense of connection without presuming entirely to explain the mysterious workings of destiny and the human heart. The paired stories that open and close the collection are perhaps the saddest: Wax cylinders used to make field recordings of traditional folk songs in 1916 appear as symbols of cherished first love lost in "The History of Sound," but in "Origin Stories" they prompt a painful acknowledgment that first love sometimes would be better left behind. Shattuck writes with delicacy and restraint of the uncertainties, missed signals, and mixed feelings that trouble personal relationships across the centuries even as we yearn for love and meaning. Intricately structured, powerfully emotional, beautifully written: This is as good as short fiction gets.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
June 10, 2024
Shattuck follows his memoir, Six Walks, with a magnificent collection about love, longing, and New England history. In the title story, set in 1919 rural Maine, college students Lionel and David become lovers while spending the summer collecting folk songs on wax cylinders. “Origin Stories,” set in 1983, revisits Lionel and David’s story when a professor’s wife sees an interview with Lionel on TV and later discovers the cylinders hidden in the old house she and her husband recently moved into. Glimmers of the past confront the protagonist of “Graft” during her visit to Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1893, where she sees a boy she thinks might be the baby she left to be raised by her sister-in-law. Shattuck shines especially in his depiction of nature, as in “The Journal of Thomas Thurber,” which recounts daily life at a logging camp in the winter of 1907–1908, where every man died under mysterious circumstances; and in “The Auk,” a poignant narrative that explains the existence of a 1991 photo of a long-extinct sea bird and reveals the story of the photographer, a man struggling to connect with his wife after she’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Deeply felt and impeccably researched, these exquisite stories capture the spirit of the Northeast. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME.
Starred review from July 1, 2024
A delving sense of place, attunement to hidden connections, and a passion for art gravitates from Shattuck's first book, Six Walks in the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (2022), to this sterling collection of intriguingly linked stories. In the title tale, in 1984, a man receives a box of wax cylinders and is catapulted back to 1916, when he was a music student and came under the spell of enigmatic David, who, after serving in WWI, took him on a folk music quest in Maine. In 1796, young Edwin likes to cook for his widowed mother in their wind-battered Nantucket home, a tenuous household nearly capsized by artist Will, who leaves them a painting of a songbird. In other stories, images of a great auk stir up solace and confusion, and an apple tree with multiple grafts spans generations of hope and sorrow. A writer in a tiny New Hampshire town researches the mysterious deaths of a group of loggers in 1907; things grow dire for a cult in 1699. In each arresting, surprising, gorgeously realized tale, Shattuck considers how art and stories are passed down, misconstrued, and lost; how love can be tragic and insufficient; how chance meetings and buried secrets resonate. Shattuck's numinous stories shimmer with longing and loss, fate and beauty.
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