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What You Can't Give Me: Incident from an Unexpected Era
These twelve stories explore the infinitely varied ways in which a shared crisis brings us face to face with ourselves, forcing us to both engage with the stranger we inevitably encounter and rely on our own kindness and mercy.
"Read one and you'll want to read the rest ... They're stories for this moment: intimate, surprising, sometimes even humbling. I found them wonderfully, distractingly different from other contemporary stories-no surprise from R.C. Binstock, whose writerly risk taking I've long admired." - Ann Beattie
"Read one and you'll want to read the rest ... They're stories for this moment: intimate, surprising, sometimes even humbling. I found them wonderfully, distractingly different from other contemporary stories-no surprise from R.C. Binstock, whose writerly risk taking I've long admired." - Ann Beattie
266 pages, Paperback
Published September 18, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 16, 2022
I feel like the china shop in the aftermath of a visit from a reckless bull. RC Binstock’s collection of short stories What You Can’t Give Me contains a series of punches to the gut, delivered to its characters and readers alike. Its current-day setting requires that it at least takes into account the unprecedented, polarizing convulsion of the COVID pandemic, which tends to plow people’s lives under, whether or not they fall ill.
There is a sharp edge in the language in these pieces; they display the author’s enviable handle on 21st Century patter; this skill colors dialogue and exposition alike. Surprising, arresting reactions erupt to the surface in Binstock’s characters here, driving the action in this stunning collection to its memorable, sometimes heart-wrenching conclusion. This collection is a direct broadside hit, among the author’s finest work.
https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2...
You will find yourself in fascinating settings here, whether it’s a funeral home trying to cope with the deluge of unexpected deaths during the pandemic’s first weeks; a grocery store where tension and aggression show a young employee’s surprising insight into the world around him; or a restaurant whose owner has had to fire almost all his employees after the dropoff of business. But it’s the vivid cast of characters which really carries this collection.
A young worldly-wise waitress feigns amusement at her boss’s lewd innuendo because she feels sure he’d never assault her; the wife whose husband suddenly and cruelly estranges himself from her and the children, but who won’t leave because of the lockdown; the grocery store bagger with Down syndrome, whose thought process shows the author’s bravura skill; and, a personal favorite, the South Asian immigrant pharmacist who administers vaccines at an assisted living home, only to have her life changed when she meets a sympathetic resident in her 90s.
What You Can’t Give Me treats interracial marriage, the #Me Too movement, and the cultural divide in a variety of settings. But in its essence, this collection explores the human need for intimate partnership. In a wide variety of settings, felt by widely divergent characters at various points in their relationships, this very human need is met, thwarted, pursued, or frustrated in the stories, but always, in Binstock’s hands, perceptively, brilliantly.
Intimate and immediate, topical and unpredictable, I can’t recommend What You Can’t Give Me enough.
There is a sharp edge in the language in these pieces; they display the author’s enviable handle on 21st Century patter; this skill colors dialogue and exposition alike. Surprising, arresting reactions erupt to the surface in Binstock’s characters here, driving the action in this stunning collection to its memorable, sometimes heart-wrenching conclusion. This collection is a direct broadside hit, among the author’s finest work.
https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2...
You will find yourself in fascinating settings here, whether it’s a funeral home trying to cope with the deluge of unexpected deaths during the pandemic’s first weeks; a grocery store where tension and aggression show a young employee’s surprising insight into the world around him; or a restaurant whose owner has had to fire almost all his employees after the dropoff of business. But it’s the vivid cast of characters which really carries this collection.
A young worldly-wise waitress feigns amusement at her boss’s lewd innuendo because she feels sure he’d never assault her; the wife whose husband suddenly and cruelly estranges himself from her and the children, but who won’t leave because of the lockdown; the grocery store bagger with Down syndrome, whose thought process shows the author’s bravura skill; and, a personal favorite, the South Asian immigrant pharmacist who administers vaccines at an assisted living home, only to have her life changed when she meets a sympathetic resident in her 90s.
What You Can’t Give Me treats interracial marriage, the #Me Too movement, and the cultural divide in a variety of settings. But in its essence, this collection explores the human need for intimate partnership. In a wide variety of settings, felt by widely divergent characters at various points in their relationships, this very human need is met, thwarted, pursued, or frustrated in the stories, but always, in Binstock’s hands, perceptively, brilliantly.
Intimate and immediate, topical and unpredictable, I can’t recommend What You Can’t Give Me enough.
January 31, 2023
These are remarkable stories of human love and vulnerability during the pandemic. COVID itself rarely makes an appearance in these pages, but its presence in the background resonates thematically and pragmatically through each story as it changed the meanings of everything: living with and being apart from, going to work and not going to work, friendship, romance, and marriage. In a landscape turned upside down, well-meaning people try to navigate the always tenuous lines of intimacy. Compassion abounds in these generous stories, political posturing is wholly absent.
Inhabited by an unforgettable multi-ethnic, multi-racial cast of characters, this book shows America at its best, and yet inescapably struggling. A Downs syndrome bagger in a grocery store learns the many meanings of risk. A remarkable meeting in a nursing home between an Indian vaccinator and a resident whose family was turned upside down by an earlier panic and her father’s compassionate response. A couple whose marriage is tested by the strange new intimacies of working from home. A funeral director overwhelmed with work and a waitress hanging onto her job by her fingernails and enduring its indignities because there is too little work.
Each of the 12 stories is independent of the others, but together they form an arc stretching through the two years of the pandemic. R.C. Binstock wisely avoids all the newspaper headlines so that these stories will continue to move us and remind us long after the controversies of this unexpected era are long forgotten.
Inhabited by an unforgettable multi-ethnic, multi-racial cast of characters, this book shows America at its best, and yet inescapably struggling. A Downs syndrome bagger in a grocery store learns the many meanings of risk. A remarkable meeting in a nursing home between an Indian vaccinator and a resident whose family was turned upside down by an earlier panic and her father’s compassionate response. A couple whose marriage is tested by the strange new intimacies of working from home. A funeral director overwhelmed with work and a waitress hanging onto her job by her fingernails and enduring its indignities because there is too little work.
Each of the 12 stories is independent of the others, but together they form an arc stretching through the two years of the pandemic. R.C. Binstock wisely avoids all the newspaper headlines so that these stories will continue to move us and remind us long after the controversies of this unexpected era are long forgotten.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews