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INTERESTING WOMEN by Andrea Lee

INTERESTING WOMEN

Stories

by Andrea Lee

Pub Date: April 16th, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50586-5
Publisher: Random House

Stories of transcontinental romance and displacement from New Yorker writer Lee (the novel Sarah Phillips, not reviewed).

As befits its title, Lee’s collection is filled to bursting with interesting women: “Interesting women—are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man.” So opens the title story, as a mother vacationing at a beachside hotel in Thailand with her 12-year-old daughter meets up with one such woman. She’s a fiftysomething divorced adventuress who calls herself Silver (apparently among other names). The story is little more than the mother’s burgeoning fascination with Silver’s wayward manners and aloof disdain for conventionality, but it’s an engaging read nonetheless. There are rarely conclusions in Lee’s tales, which tend to float away on a single, crystallized moment. Her protagonists on the whole are frightfully well-educated, high-bred American women abroad, with maybe a fashionable child or two and a European husband—Italian, usually, and almost always wealthy. A pair of stories, “The Birthday Party” and “About Fog and Cappuccino,” feature interesting women of this sort to whom nothing terribly interesting happens—not a bad thing, since Lee easily enthralls with the smallest description or observation, and her knowledge of this lifestyle is intoxicatingly thorough. But just when you’ve had about enough of Americans just a bit too impressed with how well they’ve adopted Italian customs, she throws out a curveball like “The Golden Chariot,” a theatrical reminiscence of an African-American family’s cross-country vacation ca. 1962, or “Anthropology,” in which a journalist is excoriated by her cousin for an article she wrote on the customs of the remote North Carolina community their family hailed from.

As arch as the lives depicted here are, Lee’s pinpoint accuracy for the right word and perfect tone bring a universal truth to these stories about the—well, the more interesting sex.