Still No Word from You

Starred review from June 6, 2022
Pushcart Prize–winning fiction writer Orner (Maggie Brown & Others) brings his lyrical, mosaic style to the story of his own life in this gorgeous and contemplative memoir. Blending photographs, family lore, speculation, and literary musings, Orner’s nonlinear narrative weaves through elliptical reflections and faint memories from his 1970s childhood to the sorrows and delights of his adulthood. The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, for instance, becomes a salve in the aftermath of his stepfather’s death, loitering in Orner’s mind as he reflects on his mother’s grief: “We all go where love takes us, whether closer or farther.” Elsewhere, seeking solace from some unnamed grievance, Orner spends a day marveling at the crowded prose of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day: “ connect like they do in our actual brains. Meaning: they don’t.” A similar stream of consciousness logic pervades his loosely connected vignettes, with certain recurring figures and dreamlike appearances of half-forgotten acquaintances. As Orner observes, “There’s no greater fantasy on the face of the earth than the linearity of time. Time only circles.” Likewise, when his fragmented ruminations loop back to a powerful impression or image or favorite book, the effect is like turning over a prism in one’s hands, catching vivid flashes of light at each angle. Evocative and erudite, this meditation on impermanence and its ephemeral joys is a gem.

October 15, 2022
Kafka, Orner avers, was "an incomparable reader," a statement inspired by Kafka's key insight into Don Quixote. Orner considers other "visionary readers," whom he says are, "by their nature, generally unknown," yet clearly he is one himself. His fiction, collected most recently in Maggie Brown & Others (2019), is resplendent in both feeling and artistry due, in great part, to his ""visionary"" reading, a practice so crucial to his existence that in this memoir-in-essays, as in Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (2016), there is no divide between the literary and the personal. Orner infuses his brief, jazzy, wistful, intimate, funny, and haunting narratives with abiding regret, sharp observations, and intricate musings about inheritance, childhood, parenthood, and divorce, home and displacement, profundity and ludicrousness. He portrays himself at his lowest moments and in ecstatic contemplation of the electrifying writings of fellow Chicagoans Lorraine Hansberry and Bette Howland as well as Primo Levy, Jean Rhys, Bernadette Mayer, and so many more. Orner's enrapturing essays are refined works of zealous precision, bittersweet imagination, and intrepid candor.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 15, 2022
Another top-notch collection from the author of Am I Alone Here? Orner--a legitimate triple-threat: novelist, short story master, and prolific essayist--returns with an addictive collection of more than 100 buoyant essays organized around a single day and a wide range of emotions. "Preaching the gospel of fiction"--and literature in general--the author roves around freely, exploring the work of Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, Primo Levi, Shirley Hazzard, Gina Berriault, Robert Hayden Marilynne Robinson, Yoel Hoffmann, Stacy Doris, Juan Rulfo, and numerous others. The lyrical chapters unwind from noisy "Morning" to melancholy "Night." Orner begins with vivid memories of his "loud, cackling" family members--mother, father, uncles, Grandpa Freddy in Fall River, Massachusetts--and growing up in Highland Park near Lake Michigan, a "tear rolling down the face of the Midwest," and he recounts the sadness a "dumb Jewish kid" felt watching Larry Holmes beat Muhammad Ali in 1980. Later, the author confesses, while reflecting on the more than 4,000 haiku that Richard Wright composed during his career, "like so many of my stories, nonstories, there's no movement, no forward momentum." By "Mid-Morning," Orner is wistful that fellow Midwestern author Wright Morris is "forgotten, yes, but still among us." Orner also ponders his grandfather's World War II letters to his "showgirl wife," Lorraine, often begging her to write him back. The author tells us why he "permanently borrowed" James Alan McPherson's Hue and Cry from the library, a book that contains "Gold Coast," a story he wishes he could memorize and recite "like a prayer." Ella Leffland's Mrs. Munck, which he left unfinished on a train, is one of those rare books "you go on reading whether you are reading them or not." As Orner inches toward "Night," readers will be lamenting the end of his wise, welcoming, heartfelt book.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.