THE PLEASURE WITHIN

by Robert Carter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1988

This unusual little collection of stories by the author of The Sugar Factory (1987) captures all sorts of odd people at that moment when, turning inward, they find the place where pain seems indistinguishable from pleasure. Spare but blunt and to the point, these macabre fictions often rely on overheard dialogue that's as provocative as Pinter's, and as resonant in its silences. What makes some of Carter's characters even stranger is their apparent ordinariness. The eight-year-old who lives in the garbage container at McDonald's (""Kid in a Bin"") turns out to be responding to his mother's untimely death from skin cancer. A similar skewed logic drives the distraught farmer of ""The Drought"" to an act of sacrifice that's truly biblical in its proportions, though not as grisly as one fears. In a Roald Dahl-like piece, ""The Pleasure,"" a former cab-driver becomes addicted to pleasure during a bizarre psychology experiment that proves fatal in a chilling manner. Simple madness explains the behavior of the school principal in ""Within"" and the Walter Mittyish protagonist of ""Cityman""--the first slipping back into his autistic personality, dormant since childhood, and the latter getting the opportunity to expose the superhero cape under his suit and save someone from drowning. ""Composition"" poignantly records a boy's simultaneous love for and resentment of his older, retarded brother. But unalloyed evil presents its banal self in an account of a Norwegian collaborator with the Nazis (""Tergiversator""). Madness takes a sci-fi turn in ""Mal and Fern,"" a narrative of life in a feminist dystopia where primitive thinking coexists with the advanced social engineering often proposed by feminists in our time. Carter strikes a gentler note with ""Sixties into Eighties Won't Go""--a clever dialogue in which a young Australian wife, anxious about her husband's transfer overseas, discovers that her widowed mother has already taken off on her own; and ""Prints in the Valley""--alternating views of a young female member of a remote cargo cult and the anthropologist who stays among them. Haunting work from an Australian writer worth keeping an eye on.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION