DRUNK WITH LOVE

by Ellen Gilchrist ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 1986

Mostly surface-only content and high-speed words in these 13 stories from the author of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981) and the award-winning Victory over Japan (1984). A slowly gathering depth struggles to make itself felt as this unsatisfyingly revved-up and cocky-toned volume proceeds, but even the final story (""Anna, Part 1""--a woman wills herself to give up a consuming love affair so she can ""go back to being a writer"") has about it an automatic-pilot feeling, as if it is merely the running through of a familiar subject. ""Traceleen at Dawn"" (the rich and fancy Miss Crystal gives up drinking only after her daughter--Morn out cold on the couch--sets the house on fire) slows down enough to let Gilchrist's considerable gift for wit come through in the voice of the black maid Traceleen (""Every time there is a flare-up in this relationship I end up with my back out from moving furniture""). But in ""Belize"" (about ""a bunch of bored rich people from New Orleans"") and ""The Blue-Eyed Buddhist"" (a woman drowns while freeing fish from an underwater viewing cage), the characters are fashion-ad thin and the drama is cranked up well in excess of what they can conceivably bear without the reader constantly wincing. There's a Waugh-esque satire of trendy journalism (""First Manhattans"") that again shows Gilchrist's comedy at its best, but little else succeeds with any but minimal degrees of substance or with the clear identity of satire. The three Rhoda stories (Rhoda from spoiled childhood to child-bearing middle age) rely mainly on stick-figures and sassiness for their energy. Elsewhere, a dieting woman crashes her car into a doughnut shop (""The Last Diet""); a white girl is killed by a black lover (""Memphis""); an American girl is killed by her Lebanese student-husband (""The Emancipator""); and, in the title story, Nora Jane is pregnant, but not sure by whom, while love-lorn, ultra-rich, and vacuous Freddy hopes to interest just about anybody in his glib-wordy sense of martyred woe (""Bitter. . .Bitter, bitter, bitter, jaded, tired of life and cynical. . . Nothing works. The system fucks""). Freddy's words linger as bespeaking the tone of the whole, leaving one feeling that these are at heart pre-fab fictions, to be tossed away after one use.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION