EVERYTHING YOU'VE HEARD IS TRUE

by Frances Sherwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1989

A first book of 11 stories that's most impressive when Sherwood dovetails an offbeat relationship--or a doomed marriage--with cultural or political unrest. Though the stories can be cute or derivative, mostly they contextualize personal pain until it is no longer merely personal. The best here include ""History"" (chosen for a 1989 O. Henry Award), which chronicles a brief marriage between a black medical student with social pretensions and a white ""caricature hippie""; and ""Lessons in Love: A Memoir,"" in which a Nebraskan girl contrasts her coming-of-age to her mother's decorous and finally heartbreaking affair with a fickle suitor. In the quirky ""Human Behavior,"" a deserted woman who works at a primate center writes letters to her ex-husband and gets involved with a former Ph.D. candidate who gave up the rat race to be a tree surgeon: the juxtapositions can be forced, but usually they give a dizzy rhythm to the story. Likewise, in ""The Cat Woman and the Frog Prince,"" a divorced piano teacher who loves cats and moonlights in delinquent accounts for Sears meets a man who loves snakes and who, in his habitat, becomes reptilian. ""Collect Calls"" successfully places a camera crew in a shelter for the homeless, where disorder turns to violence. The title story (the best of three Caribbean dialect pieces) is told by a self-proclaimed political prisoner placed in a madhouse on a Caribbean island after an aborted attempt to drown the P.M., while ""Me at the Gas Station,"" aggressively quirky, chronicles a Trinidadian narrator's misadventures in the US in the 60's before he returns home to sanity. The third dialect piece (""The Red Fridge"") and the opening story (""Arrowheads"") try to be a trace too fabulistic and come off as clever. There's too much literary echo here--Bobble Ann Mason comes immediately to mind--but, still, Sherwood is inventive, talented, and promising.

Pub Date: May 15, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1989

Categories: FICTION