These eleven essays span continents, culture, and class. Fiction writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio inspects manufactured homes in Washington state; tours the rooms of Hell House, a Pentecostal "haunted house" in Texas; visits the dormitories and hallways of a Russian orphanage in Svrstroy; and explored the textual space of family letters, at once expansive and claustrophobic. In these spaces, or the people who inhabit them, he unearths a kind of optimism, however guarded. He introduces us to a defender of gray whales; the creator of Biosquat, a utopian experiment in Austin, Texas; and a younger version of himself, searching for "culture" in Seattle in 1974. He analyzes the nuances of Mary Kay Letourneau's trial and contemplates the persistence of rain and of memory.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this excellent collection of essays culled mainly from the Seattle weekly the Stranger, D'Ambrosio (The Point and Other Stories) brings to the real world the same idiosyncratic personal language and keen, melancholic intelligence of his fiction. The pieces range widely on the public-private continuum, from an intimate meditation on his brother's suicide (published, in a slightly different form, in the New Yorker) to a commentary on the dispute between environmentalists and Native American whale hunters in the Pacific Northwest; somewhere in between lies the title essay, firsthand reportage about an orphanage clinging to a fragile sense of community in the Kafkaesque chaos of post-Communist Russia. These disparate subjects are united by the author's persistent themes of the fakery of mass-produced images of reality and the rigidity of public rhetoric and ideology. At a media stakeout of a barricaded gunman, D'Ambrosio observes a TV reporter "rush in front of the camera and morph into the face of a slightly panicked and alarmed person nevertheless manfully maintaining heroic control while reporting nearby horrors." An essay on Mary Kay Letourneau probes the inadequacy of the vocabularies of crime and psychotherapy in describing her affair with a 13-year-old boy. A piece on a lurid haunted house named Hell House, in which gruesome dramas are staged and the characters in them are sent to hell for every transgression, notes that "it wasn't sin so much as sadness and despair and heartbreak and misfortune and cluelessness and just every stupid human possibility that was answered with damnation." D'Ambrosio's perceptive insistence on the primacy of the individual's voice and viewpoint sounds a resolutely humanistic tone.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
As a verb, essay means to put to the test, and this element of inquiry is unusually conspicuous in D'Ambrosio's zesty and piercing essays, finely crafted works that are at once lush and direct, brainy and full of feeling. D'Ambrosio, author of the short story collection The Point (1995), with another fiction title on the way, interrogates everything. Preternaturally sensitive to setting, he not only describes the sensuousness of a place with shivery specificity, whether it's a crime scene on a rainy night, his uncle's grimy Chicago bar, an experimental ecovillage in Texas, or a Russian orphanage, but also discerns its unique emotional valence. By turns witty, scathing, and elegiac, his exacting essays are exceptionally vital quests for meaning, and Seattle-based D'Ambrosio chooses his loaded subjects well, writing with nerve and rigor, for instance, about the controversy over Native American whaling and teacher and convicted sex-offender Mary Kay Letourneau. D'Ambrosio's kinetic and evocative works reach to the very core of being and induce readers to question their every assumption. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great, lively, compassionate essays,
By Sam (Houston TX) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Orphans (Paperback)
"The essays in Orphans all turn on the axis of doubt, ambivalence, uncertainty and hesitancy. D'Ambrosio believes these qualities are essential to human nature, and finds himself in essay after essay crossing swords with the knights of absolutism, whether they bear the standard of fundamentalist Christianity, radical environmentalism or the Channel 24 Action News. . . . D'Ambrosio is a major talent. He blends the absurdist sensibility of Donald Barthelme with John Updike's plush prose and Philip Roth's dyspeptic humor to create a voice wholly his own. Whether his muse will some day deliver a great novel is an open question, but for now we have Orphans, and Orphans is plenty."
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Rare Gem,
By Nico (Spain) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Orphans (Paperback)
This is a brilliant and moving book. D'Ambrosio has the incisive intelligence of a theoretical physicist and the soul of a poet. Combined with a seasoned craftsman's control of prose style, these qualities make for a truly impressive collection. His manner is frank and direct, without posturing, and the overall effect is a powerful one of juxtaposition: the lucid and feeling individual adrift in a world of crumbling values, brutish insensitivity and rampant hypocrisy. But D'Ambrosio, by virtue of his own humorous vulnerability, avoids the obvious pitfalls of a condescending or judgmental tone. Which isn't to say that he does not judge or despise the execrable when he finds it. Most of all he demonstrates that the only real weapon against the general stupidity and phoniness which abounds, is the beauty and nobility inherent in a truly personal and compassionate vision of life and language. This book is a rare gem.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fresh, startling and smart - read it,
By Velvet Elvis (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Orphans (Paperback)
D'Ambrosio's writing is distinguished by its openness, wit and intelligence. "Orphans" is a pleasingly small book - you can fit it comfortably in your pocket, but there are entire worlds evoked in its pages. Whether he's examining his own queasy reaction to a religious "Hell House" display in Texas, the ambitions of a loopy eco-futurist, or life among the lost souls of a Chicago tavern, D'Ambrosio weaves together keen observations of the physical world with poignant forays into his personal history. It's funny, haunting and fierce.
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