Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

While reading "Mr. Bones" I kept telling my husband that he just has to read this book. It is so good that I couldn't wait to share it with him.

What brilliant writing and amazing imagination! "Mr. Bones" has aspects of Stephen King style weirdness, but on a more sophisticated level. Theroux gives us twenty short stories of varied settings and styles, from four to fifty pages in length. Their commonality is that all are artfully written and ingenious.

Three stories are actually collections of vignettes of a page or two in length. Yet, Theroux is able to convey compelling images and events in this short space. I am at impressed with the effective characters and scenes he creates in just a page.

A general theme of "Mr. Bones" is that people show more are strange, even grotesque, in behavior. Often we witness the gradual disintegration of a person. These are fascinating portraits of bizarre experiences and characters.

Theroux's nonfiction writing of people and places has been critical, even controversial. I sense that "Mr. Bones" may capture Theroux's impressions of people, on an exaggerated level.

"Mr. Bones" loses one star due to poor endings. The stories are magnificent, but just tail off. I felt like Theroux didn't know how to wrap them up. show less

Most of Theroux’s collection of stories is about men behaving badly in various ways (usually sex) but get their comeuppances in the end in clever and unexpected ways. The collection is uneven, with some real gems while others don’t seem to work well, usually because they are too short to be engaging. Theroux attempts two stories as a series of unrelated vignettes, most of which are less than a page long. Although one was themed by various forms of sexual relationships ("Voices of Love”), the other was not obviously related thematically and thus quite disjointed (“Long Story Short”). The longer stories seemed to work better. In “Our Raccoon Year” a divorced father takes care of his two boys in a very permissive way. At show more first he accepts raccoons on his property but slowly transforms into being obsessed with eliminating them. He will do anything to them. In the end he gives up custody of his two boys to his much-hated wife so that he can pursue his obsession with killing raccoons. Some of the stories had plot twists that were difficult to see coming. In “Incident in the Oriente”—Moses is a very efficient independent contractor working with a small group of workers in Ecuador. Their work is behind schedule because two of his workers are too friendly with the natives and each other. He needs them to stay on the job but work harder. This seems like an insoluble problem. However, he solves it by ordering one of the men to shoot the other’s pet dog. This breaks up their friendship and successfully gets them to focus on the work. Sometimes what appears to auger for a bad outcome ends favorably. “Rip It Up” has two nerdy boys who are bullied in high school and plot revenge on their tormentors. This becomes the making of a bomb they plan to set off at a soccer match but by mistake they explode it and one of them gets injured. Instead of causing them problems, this gives them a certain cache with the cool kids because the latter think of them as a couple of dangerous rebels. show less

The first third of this collection was interesting but I have to say the middle was muddle of quite short stories that made little sense and had no kind of conclusion and little satisfaction. the final few longer stories were just ok. This from a writer whose novels I have enjoyed. Not highly recommended.

Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux is a very highly recommended, wonderfully descriptive collection of twenty short stories. There should be a story that will appeal to almost everyone in these masterfully well written stories, many of which take common-place occurrences and put a twist on them.

The collection includes:

Minor Watt: A wealthy man destroys his priceless treasure simply because he can.
Mr. Bones: A mild mannered father has a drastic and startling personality change.
Our Raccoon Year: A plague of raccoons changes a family's already fluid dynamics.
Mrs. Everest: A painter meets a gallery owner who courts his company even though she doesn't like his work.
Another Necklace: An author has a secret.
Incident in the Oriente: An overseas show more contractor wields his influence over those he employs.
Rip It Up: Anxious, pimply fourteen-year-olds devise a plan to extract retribution on their bullies.
Siamese Nights: A man is assigned to work in Bangkok where he keeps a pictorial diary of drawings and meets someone special.
Nowadays the Dead Don’t Die: A man in the bush is asked to take a man with no family to the hospital. When the ill man dies on the way, he is unceremoniously buried - but then things begin to go wrong.
Autostop Summer: A writer visits Italy and recalls a trip there many years ago.
Voices of Love: This is a collection of short vignettes, first-person flash fiction, of unfaithful people.
The Furies: A man marries a much younger woman and his past begins to catch up with him.
Rangers: Scam artists hook-up and hit the road.
Action: A young man runs an errand for his father, who is very protective of him.
Long Story Short: Another collection of short first-person flash fiction stories that feature young men coming-of age.
Neighbor Islands: A Hawaiian police officer catches his wife in a compromising position and then the incident is looked at from several viewpoints.
The Traveler’s Wife: A travel writer's wife starts expressing her opinions.
The First World: A wealthy man retires to Nantucket where he wishes to build his dream house.
Heartache: An elderly writer dies in the deep South.
I’m the Meat, You’re the Knife: A man who is back in his home town for his father's funeral visits his old English teacher who is dying.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via Netgalley for review purposes. show less