Peter Orner has the unique ability to invent fully-formed, vibrant characters within the shortest of stories. The author’s latest collection, Maggie Brown & Others, is an exuberant body of such carefully crafted characters ... Their stories—little windows through which we view a snippet of their day—are often plotless, but plot feels unnecessary when we are engrossed by the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Orner’s characters are unapologetic and complex, holding guilt, fear, and love ... Orner’s impressive stories are also peppered with visceral language ... full of nuance and a special kind of lightness.
There’s a beautiful drifting quality to Maggie Brown & Others, a sense of being invited inside a roving, kaleidoscopic mind — reluctant to generalize, tender, astute, with an eye for both comedy and heartache — and adopting its rhythms as your own ... If Orner is bold in his embrace of unconventional narrative structures and organizing principles, his work is also without pretense, powerfully aware of how difficult it is to capture experience on the page ... At times, some of the stories start to feel gloomily repetitive, rehashing failed marriages or love affairs. More interesting is the way Orner captures the power of flickering encounters that don’t count as major milestones but persist in memory for what they have unleashed: a violent urge, a sharp regret, a renewed estrangement from or connection to the self ... Perhaps the collection’s most powerful section is its final one, a wonderfully granular, funny yet also moving novella-in-stories ... Peter Orner is a wonderful guide, training our gaze from window to window, where we find reflections of ourselves even as we glimpse the inscrutable, captivating lives on the other side of the glass.
One way to get a handle on Orner is to observe that he writes short. His stories tend to be three or four pages, gone in the blink of an eye, though some are longer. In his novels, he keeps the chapters clipped tight, too. Rarely are these chapters more than a few hundred words. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? Reading him I recalled Clive James’s crack that some literary magazines fetishize brief stories, 'as if written specifically for people who are bright but tired.' The stories in Maggie Brown & Others, too, are mostly just a few pages long. They’re piers rather than bridges ... An upside to this brevity: Your mind is given a lot of pit stops, so you can recharge and load up on snacks for the next stretch of asphalt. A downside: Orner’s stories flick by awfully quickly. You can feel you’re flipping through boxes of vintage postcards. Your eyes can glaze ... Orner can do anything, so he tries to do everything. There’s never a sense that he is flailing. His sentences run clear and true. He’s not the sort of writer who, in a gun battle, would be saved by the bullet that strikes his thesaurus.
... like a window into a writer’s mind ... Rather than discard the short shorts — many of which are forgettable — for a stronger, more compact volume, Orner leaves it all on the pages, almost mimicking the memories one accumulates over a lifetime: one story about this person, a fragment of that event, a scrap of the time such-and-such occurred ... All this consistency is great news for Orner’s fans, but perhaps represents a bit of an Achilles’ heel for the author, as there is little that feels new in this new book ... Orner is a skilled writer who can be incredibly moving ... With so much exciting contemporary fiction, do we really want to revisit Fall River?
Though Maggie Brown barely exceeds 300 pages, its 44 stories—some of them as brief as a page or two—and a concluding novella so teem with ingenuity, wit and variety that there were times when I felt like a tourist on a bus racing through a country full of impressive sites where I might instead prefer to linger. Grouped into five sections, the stories move from the California coast to Chicago in the 1980s to New York’s Hudson Valley to Fall River, Massachusetts, with lots of detours on the way, exploring life in all its tragic and comic dimensions ... Orner’s compassion flourishes ... Orner’s talent for creating memorable characters reaches its apex in 'Walt Kaplan Is Broke,' the novella-in-stories that composes the final third of Maggie Brown ... Peter Orner’s fiction overflows with small moments of illumination, little jolts of hard-earned wisdom and humor that detonate on nearly every page ... he’s done nothing short of conjuring the dross of everyday life into pure gold.
...these stories, which are frequently as short as a few lines or paragraphs (the shorter ones may be the best), never seem confined to the pages on which they appear. Though set in different eras, going back to the ’60s, as well as in different time zones, they float over and under each other, their recurring characters cutting across time and space. Though they’re arranged in titled, suite-like sections, you get the sense that they’d work in any just about any order you chose ... Maggie Brown & Others is so full of brilliant, reverberant lines—and cuttingly funny ones as well—they are like critics’ popcorn: You can’t stop citing 'em.
Peter Orner’s intimate voice, his deft touch — how he ends a story just when the protagonist is leaning over the edge of a cliff, suspended and preparing themselves for a fall — is what makes Maggie Brown & Others so memorable. His lost characters find themselves stuck between pragmatisms and ambition, love and responsibility, and they squirm inside these parameters, either eking out meaning or succumbing to alienation and ennui ... With these characters, Orner inhabits others’ minds and bodies with such compassion, treating them as if they were family or, better yet, himself ... devastating and beautiful ... The primary setback of the brief style that largely defines Maggie Brown & Others—many of its stories are two- to four-pages long — is that they move so quickly that it’s easy to miss them, to not absorb them like one would longer pieces. Orner can poignantly describe a life or a relationship in two hundred words, but if the reader’s attention lapses for only a sentence, that life or relationship will have passed by — but maybe that’s partially the point: that the stories’ brevity, their few but immensely important details, exemplifies how easy it is for some to not notice the depth of those who exist on the margins of their lives, how effortless and ill-fated it is to gloss over another person.
... Orner...has a deep literary attachment to the quotidian, 'which isn’t ordinary—no, not at all.' Not when you really think about it, as Orner does across his new collection ... Orner writes with a combination of sincerity and self-awareness. He takes a subtle tone of empathy toward his characters’ ambitions by acknowledging how simultaneously unremarkable and wrenching their lives feel ... Orner’s characters are conscious of unfurling their own stories, determined to do so, yet also aware of the relative futility of the endeavor ... the book is in its totality most vividly reminiscent of Raymond Carver[.]
Orner, the author of four previous books of fiction, is a master of the aphoristic short story. The 44 concise and stinging tales simmering here, along with a stunningly piquant novella, Walt Kaplan is Broke, express a full spectrum of caustic observations, nuanced emotions, and life-warping predicaments ... poignant and hilarious ... Orner writes with a heady blend of gravitas and wit similar to that of such kindred short-story virtuosos as Deborah Eisenberg, Andre Dubus, and Gina Berriault, while expressing his own edgy empathy and embrace of everyday absurdity.
In every one of the 44 stories in this book the language is deceptively casual, easy. The characters are familiar, kooky in the way people we might know could be ... As short as they are, these stories might just be the opposite of flash in that they seem to stretch in time beyond the space they take up. The deceivingly simple word combinations and imagery have the effect of stopping time ... genius.
A tone of wistful and often comic nostalgia pervades many of the stories, for Orner has a sharp eye for absurdity and a discerning ear for dialogue ... Insightful, rueful, and often humorous, this collection holds a mirror to contemporary life and gives the reader much to reflect on.
... powerful ... express[es] Orner’s talent for crafting captivating character sketches that read like memoirs ... Readers will sympathize with Orner’s characters and identify with their all-too-human frailties.
