'What do you do when you don't know what you want to do anymore?' asks Orion, a disenchanted photojournalist in 'Peru,' the first story in this impressive collection, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Many of McNally's characters are young adults searching for meaning in a world that has already left them disillusioned. 'We spend our lives looking for signs―for thin, brief moments of direction,' observes Ruth in 'The Anonymity of Flight.' Gradually the reader observes that the characters in the stories are connected―as siblings, childhood friends, ex-lovers. In 'Jet Stream' Ruth and Betsy are teenagers in Phoenix; in 'The Future of Ruth,' Ruth is living with Orion. This interrelatedness sometimes frustrates attempts to locate a unifying perspective, and McNally's occasionally intellectualized commentary ('We can only know what we once didn't know') is distancing. But his prose is lean and powerful, and the brief scenes―strung together with little formal structure―effectively convey the desolation of lost dreams.
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Publishers WeeklyWhile each story stands alone, each is also connected to the others. Together, they weave a loose history of the lives of characters Orion and Helen. The progress of these individuals through time is chronicled with brief and tantalizing glimpses at the events that shaped their lives. The overall tone is dark and moody, reflecting the tragedies of everyday life. Dialog and description are skillfully rendered. This is a fascinating storytelling technique.
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Library JournalExtraordinary . . . McNally's is a deep understanding of the mind that lives with mourning, and he has mastered an original language to depict it. . . . An enormously gifted writer.
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San Francisco ChronicleMemorable . . . The interrelationships of the characters are telegraphed briskly and enigmatically; their stories are full of takeoffs, landings and every kind of flight imaginable.
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Louisville Courier JournalMcNally's 14 intriguingly interconnected stories have a crystalline quality―they're hard, sharp-edged, faceted, and fragile.These are haunting stories that revolve around the deep sorrows of desertion, abuse, and death, but they sing with an acceptance of the power and mysteries of pain, love, and the conflicting forces of flight and gravity.
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BooklistRemarkable . . . A storyteller's gallery of unforgettable portraits . . . One of McNally's significant accomplishments is that we wind up caring, often quite deeply.
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Chicago TribuneA meditation on the meaning of loss. In stark, imagistic prose―part Ernest Hemingway, part Wallace Stevens―McNally . . . links events randomly and geometrically, the way life links them.
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New York Times
These stories to not take the paved route, the neat path, but carve their own way with stunning honesty through the light and dark complexities of character and relationship.
About the Author
T. M. MCNALLY is the author of six books of fiction, including his first, Low Flying Aircraft, which won the 1990 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, DoubleTake, Yale Review, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. He teaches at Arizona State University.
