Reviews for Banquet

The average rating for Banquet based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-17 00:00:00 Nicholas Evans Means stares straight into the parts of life we prefer to leave in the dark, and this collection is a haunting, beautiful result of that bravery. I picked up this collection of short stories after reading Means' story "Two Nurses, Smoking" in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago. This collection feels like "Two Nurses"'s divorced uncle. The stories are driven by the same obsessions with loneliness, imperfect love, and blue-gray, semi-abandoned small towns on the Hudson River. However, while "Two Nurses" is hopeful, finishing on the upswing of an unlikely love, these stories tend to focus on life's downswings. They dwell in moments of despair'the self-doubt of a cheating spouse, the mood swings of a grieving widow, the haunted guilt of a mother who outlives her daughter. These stories feel so much like a winter on the Hudson, the very setting in which so many of them take place. They're full of loneliness, but in being placed together, the stories bring each of their lonely characters together in the common struggle of living a life in contemporary America. The characters are lost, stuck in a living purgatory, which isn't as repulsive as it may sound. Instead, the collection draws you in, invites you to bask in the uncertainty we all feel but don't dare to acknowledge.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-04 00:00:00 Ebgenii Cylimob It begins with two words: "THE DECLIVITY..." and in the stark brutality of those capitals - one word small and common, the other strange, self-consciously artful in its unfamiliarity - the reader feels the beads of sweat prinking into glistening existence on his soon-to-be-furrowed brow, for by those two words and those two words alone, he knows he is in the grip of Great American Literature: remorseless and unforgiving in its brooding power drawn from the primeval heart of that young, dark continent, yearning to be read aloud in that slow, laconic, Lake Wobegon accent that makes almost any prose sound profound, as long as the adjectives are as rich as tar, the metaphors as obscure as an Indiana railrodder and the sentences long, impossibly long -- 250 words in places -- homecoming quilts of subordinate clauses stitched lovingly together with straining semicolons, curt m-dashes and 'parentheses' -- in an affected Jack Kerouac stream of consciousness that makes you ask how something however well executed could be called ground-breaking if it harks back to a style that came into vogue 50 years ago and has antecedents an ocean and a century away in James Joyce; full of attention to the minutest detail; full of nothing BUT detail in fact, psychological in its intensity, looking not at events but at those mundane moments that call to mind -- crystallize in fact -- those defining moments of death, sorrow and yearning long-past, and all performed with art and style; the beautiful tension of holding together such an impossible sentence structure without which Great American Literature is simply impossible -- the Wile E Coyote running on air; or the infinite poise of Muhammad Ali, frozen in time the intense anticipation of the blow that never fell -- could never fall -- would spoil the moment -- but the beauty of the possibility in its grace that makes the world gasp, hold its breath -- and Means succeeds, he does it, just, not quite triumphantly but beautifully, artfully, gracefully, as the cascade of syllables becomes a crescendo of art - O THE DECLIVITY, THE DECLIVITY! ... the reader gasps at the audacity, pretentiousness perhaps, yet is suspended almost frozen in that beautiful moment, then is released from the spell, reaches for his coffee and approaches the next word.