Publishers Weekly
★ 03/28/2022
Shorr proves herself a literary mimic of the first order with these two pitch-perfect stories. The first, “Great Uncle Edward” is an Auchincloss-like examination of old money New York in the late 1970s. The unnamed narrator holds a dinner party for her husband’s 93-year-old great-uncle, Edward. Dinner conversation ranges over the family’s history, and names of family acquaintances are dropped, from George Washington and Toussaint Louverture to Edith “Pussy” Wharton and Ved Mehta. Along the way, there are hints that their WASPy way of life will soon be obsolete. In the second, “Cleveland Auto Wrecking,” Sam White is an Eastern European immigrant who arrives at 13 at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century and ends up living in Youngstown, Ohio, where he marries, fathers three sons, and, after years of struggle, does well in the scrap metal business. Sam begins parlaying his scrap metal success into Southern California real estate ventures, which ultimately make the Whites’ fortune. But when one son dates a woman above his class, it causes friction inside the family. The author cleverly juxtaposes how one aspect of American society falls as another rises, and both novellas have a novellike density of detail and depth of characterization. Together, they offer rich rewards. (May)
Booklist (starred)
"In style and substance, Shorr summons the works of Anne Tyler as she rejoices in her characters’ day-to-day experiences, dropping pearls of insight into crystalline vignettes."
Wall Street Journal - Daniel Akst
"[An] inventive excavation of the past, this one in the form of two novellas whose themes are family and class, one an account of patrician decline and the other a tale of rags to riches. Each is a minor masterpiece.....Together they form a witty and moving portrait of American life going back a half-century or more....Ms. Shorr excels at capturing the arc of a relationship as well as of a life."
Lily Tuck
"Victoria Shorr is a conjurer of the highest order, artfully creating apposite tales of family ruin and family success in her wry, insightful, and elegant prose."
New York Times Book Review - Alida Becker
"What links the Perkinses and the Whites, apart from the fact that their trajectories are meeting “midair”? For starters, there’s Shorr’s eye for telling detail as she unreels the families’ varied experiences. And then there’s her insightful acknowledgment that those experiences are transformed as they sink into the past, that their subtle shadings will inevitably be lost."
Susanna Moore
"The two novellas in Victoria Shorr's book Mid-Air are intimate portraits of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the dangers implicit in nostalgia. Rich with an acerbic skepticism and abetted by the unexpected detail that renders something humorous, Shorr writes with a tolerance of ambiguity that is provocative as well as enlightening."
Kirkus Reviews
2022-04-12
One family finds its fortunes on the rise just as another sees its own begin to fall.
The two novellas that make up Shorr’s lovely new book describe the falling, in one, and, in the other, the rising fortunes of two American families. In the first piece, a young couple hosts a dinner party for a few remaining members of the husband’s WASPy family: Uncle Edward, now in his 90s, who still wears a three-piece suit every day; Cousin Betty, who once read all of Proust while pursuing a divorce; Russell, whose father staked the family’s security on a biography he was writing—a definitive one—of Benjamin Franklin only to lose, at the last minute, the only manuscript; etc. In the second piece, Sam White arrives at Ellis Island from what might have been Poland, or Ukraine—somewhere in Eastern Europe, anyway—to a newly anglicized name as well as a new life. Eventually, he acquires a wife, three sons, and an auto wrecking yard in Ohio, and the family’s mobility is rapidly ascendant. In both pieces, Shorr takes the long view, describing years—decades, sometimes—within a single paragraph. In the first piece, this strategy works well. The dinner party provides the perfect framing device for the narrator to shift her gaze from guest to guest. Shorr’s prose is fluid and supple, and the story has a lively movement. The second piece, however, about the White family, becomes bogged down in places. This story is longer and includes more characters and a longer span of time, and though Shorr uses the same quickly moving narrative strategy, it doesn’t work quite as well as it did the first time. Still, her insights are so keen, and her storytelling so elegant and natural, it would be easy to follow her down just about any train of thought.
With its neat corners and tidily resolved patterns, this book is a quiet accomplishment.
