THE TOMCAT'S WIFE

by Carol Bly ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 1991

From author of the well-received nonfiction Letters from the Country (1981), here are eight leisurely stories alluringly sharp in their observations but edging toward the platitudinous in the faintly sweet uplift of their messages. In ""The Tomcat's Wife,"" a rural small-town housewife sees through the smug falseness of an out-of-town psychologist--but then so does the reader, this psychologist being little more than a two-dimensional straw man set up for a fall. The story groans under the weight of its less-than-subtle conflict between local goodness and big-city badness, but it's redeemed by Bly's otherwise observant and penetrating wit in taking stock of these lives (the jokes of local men ""did not have to be especially funny; the point was to keep up a jeering level to prevent self-pity""). In ""My Lord Bag of Rice,"" the widow of a crude husband opens a boardinghouse in St. Paul and finds whole new realms of possibility and promise in her life; while in ""After the Baptism"" and ""The Tender Organizations,"" symbols of hope and human redemption rise up after deaths by cancer--in one case through the unexpected monologue of an eccentric widow, in the other through the inner monologue of an oft-beaten old dog that's been rescued by a generously good-hearted (and newly pregnant) rector's wife. Bly sails close to the winds of the melodramatic and saccharine in these stories of plain lives, but her intellectual curiosity, in general, keeps her out of the shallows, as does her Chaucerian objectivity in seldom failing to find some good in the worst of sorts. An unconvincingly upbeat note ends the poverty-and-privilege explorations of ""The Ex-Class Agent""; the residents of a retirement home in Duluth organize to collect a bad debt (""A Committee of the Whole""); and the longish and several-charactered sociology of a withering northern Minnesota town (""Amends"") bas plenty of social-realism allure even without the murder of a pregnant high-school girl (from the wrong side of town) to pull it along. Capable stories from the world of Garrison Keillor: familiar but pleasantly substantial ruminations.

Pub Date: April 10, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION