Thirteen Ways of Looking

Starred review from July 20, 2015
A novella evoking insecurity in the age of security cameras and three heartbreaking stories make up McCann’s (TransAtlantic) latest short-fiction collection. Various ways of looking—which are referenced in the title novella and serve as the highlight of this outstanding volume—include cameras installed in elderly Judge Mendelssohn’s Upper East Side apartment, at the neighborhood restaurant where Mendelssohn meets his son for lunch, and along the street where Mendelssohn, walking home alone, is assaulted just outside camera range. Mendelssohn’s memories and observations alternate with video images that police examine and reexamine to identify his assailant. Human and technical perspectives (and even a housefly’s) are captured in spare, suggestive prose. Videotapes, for example, show something of a Greek epic, “the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away like an ancient word stepping off a page.” Insights into aging, the justice system, and dislocation widen the novella’s scope; details of how things work keep it real. The second story, for instance, details the process of writing stories. A writer imagines a Marine in Afghanistan phoning home; the image becomes a story; details emerge; the story takes on a life of its own. The collection finishes with “Sh’khol,” which follows the adoptive mother of a mentally disabled boy missing in Galway Bay, in Ireland, and “Treaty,” about a nun, scarred from brutal torture in Latin America, who sees her abuser on television—a statesman negotiating a peace treaty. Separate and together, these four works prove McCann a master with a poet’s ear, a psychologist’s understanding, and a humanitarian’s conscience. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

May 15, 2015

In his first collection in 12 years, National Book Award and IMPAC Literary Award winner McCann offers three stories, plus a novella about an elderly judge who receives updates on the police investigation into his forthcoming murder. Only one piece, "Sh'Khol," about a deaf boy who vanishes while swimming off Ireland's coast after his mother buys him a wet suit, has been published previously; look for its inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2015.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 30, 2015
McCann’s reading, like his writing, is disconcerting at first. He will divide a sentence into staccato segments, then rapidly string many nouns or adjectives together. But soon the listener is rapt, as McCann’s tempo follows multiple narrators to intensify his characters’ moment-to-moment experience. The result is spectacular. Soon we are deep into the anguish and mettle of lonely men and women who fill this collection of three short stories and a novella and three short stories. There’s the funny old judge Mendelson, his body and memory failing, maneuvering in the snow to get to he knows not what. There’s a writer struggling to write a story about a young female soldier alone on New Years Eve awhile stationed in Afghanistan. Authors are often not the best readers of their own work, but in McCann’s case it’s hard to imagine who else could master the rhythms of his language and make every moment so vital, so tender, so painfully clear. A Random hardcover.

Starred review from November 1, 2015

This collection by McCann, winner of the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, features one novella and three stories depicting people experiencing drastic life changes. In the title novella, an elderly man contemplates his past while fulfilling his daily routine during what will be the last hours of his life. A female American soldier assigned to night watch at a frigid outpost in Afghanistan counts the minutes until she can make a New Year's Eve call home. A single mother wakes on the day after Christmas to discover that her disabled son has gone swimming off the coast of Galway. And in the final story, an aging Irish nun flies from Long Island to London to confront a Colombian peace negotiator who raped her decades before. Each character struggles to articulate her or his feelings for another. Their aches are palpable, their urgencies lucid. VERDICT McCann's first story collection in 12 years marks his triumphant return to the genre. Luminescent prose and finely rendered characters create a spell readers will be reluctant to shake. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2015
A superbly crafted and deeply moving collection of fiction, with a provocative back story. The Irish-born, New York-based McCann (who won the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin) here offers four pieces of fiction that focus on the process of writing and the interplay between art and its inspiration. As he writes in a concluding Author's Note, "Every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical. For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways." He provides literary framing with the title, evoking the oft-cited Wallace Stevens poem. As for autobiography: the title novella's multilayered narrative evokes an incident that-amazingly-happened to McCann after he wrote the story, in which he was cold-cocked on the sidewalk by a stranger in a seemingly senseless attack. The story's protagonist is an aged judge of failing body but nimble mind who has just had dinner with his boorish son when he's assaulted on the street. The story is told in the third person, but most of it hews closely to the judge's point of view. As he ponders his mortality, he muses, "Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, even the problem of being alive." Other perspectives come from a series of seemingly omnipresent security cameras-in the judge's apartment, in the public areas of his Upper East Side building, and in the restaurant where he has dinner with his son; their images are investigated after the attack by detectives whose work McCann compares with literary critics interpreting a poem. The three other stories are shorter, often involving a crime or a loss or a threat of some sort, with the writer's presence most evident in "What Time Is It Now, Where Are You?," which begins, "He had agreed in spring to write a short story for the New Year's Eve edition of a newspaper magazine," and then proceeds through possible variations of that story. "Sh'khol" explores similarities between a story the protagonist has translated and a possible tragedy she's facing. The closing "Treaty" has an activist nun of advanced years and unreliable memory disturbed by images of a man who brutalized her almost four decades earlier. The author's first collection of shorter fiction in more than a decade underscores his reputation as a contemporary master.

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