Scan barcode
chillcox15's review against another edition
4.0
"Dated" isn't an inherently negative term, even if it is frequently deployed as such. Much of "The Anarchist's Convention" is dated, both in good and bad ways. One of the most popular stories in the collection, "I-80 Nebraska" is incredibly dated, in that it's about a cadre of truckers rallying against someone clogging up their CB airwaves. It's sublimely 70s in all the best ways, something no one would think to write in any other decade than the decade of "Convoy". The middle suite of stories, all concerning a character named Brian as he moves from his teenage years across the United States to his young adulthood in California, all feel like little slices of not just a country but a country at a particular point in its history, dealing with the fallout of the tumult of not just the revolutionary 1960s but everything else, the reactionary 50s, the wartime 40s, the depressed 30s, that led up to it. The 70s feel like a loose decade of traumatized, uneasy calm, where free radicals of recent history were still pinging across the landscape, selling drugs along the heartland or burrowing into fallout shelters a few miles away from missile silos. Sayles also falls victim to some of the negative sides of datedness- for how perceptive and politically acute he can be, he still falls prey to some of the white male chauvinism so prevalent in his contemporaries: the borderline yellowface of "Tan," which is about Vietnamese people affected by the war, is horrific, and many of his female characters need much to be desired. All in all, though, this is a pretty great short story collection, with far more high points (including the title story and "Children of the Silver Screen") than low.
More...