Prashker (Duty, Honor, Vietnam: Twelve Men of West Point) examines family and work relationships throughout this crisp, polished, potent, and engaging collection of classic magazine-style short fiction, most set in New York City and many originally published at industry leaders like McCalls, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Playboy. He opens with stories related to childhood, with standouts like “Room 503,” about a fourteen-year-old boy whose grandfather is messily murdered and “The Doll,” about a widower with two young daughters who is struggling to jump back into the dating pool. The next sections examine, with sensitivity and brisk authority, the wounds of the Holocaust and World War II. The fast-paced “Fortunes of War,” a tale about an American soldier revisiting Italy after the war and finding a long-lost relative, moves in every sense of the verb, paying touching attention to what horrors its protagonist—“a decent enough fellow” who “couldn’t help feeling slightly superior to the forebears he’d just helped liberate”—did and didn’t know.
Each story proves impactful. In “Hazardous Pay” readers meet Hal Weiler, a soldier charged with retrieving an AWOL Black soldier from a shamefully racist Texas town, while “P.O.W.” centers on a grieving mother whose child is either dead or a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Office and family politics mix into toxicity in “The Boss’s Son,” set in the pulp magazine world, about a spoiled man who cheats on his wife (father laments, “You’re a liar, and that’s bad enough! But what’s worse is, you’re not even a good liar!”) and “The Paranoid,” in which an advertising exec readers are certain to hate wants his wife to become a stay-at-home mother.
The author deftly spins his tales so that each builds upon another, with characters examined during different times in their lives and motives told from multiple perspectives. Readers will enjoy these thoughtful, frank stories, packed with sharp prose, vivid milieus, human insight, and old-fashioned commercial power.
