The plots may be familiar, but the sensibility is refreshingly different. A voice coming into its own.
Eleven stories tackle the entanglements of young love and marriage, in a second collection by Flannery O’Connor Award–winning from Brady (The End of the Class War, 1999).
Wandering his neighborhood in search of evidence about the accident that injured him, the Vicodin-anesthetized whiplash victim of “Side by Side” feels an attraction that animates all these tales: “The lit windows, tantalizing behind drawn curtains, beckon him, and on those rare occasions when he passes an uncurtained window, he slows to seize this glimpse through a peephole into another world.” More often than not, this other world is tinged by the residues of lingering traumas, small and large. In “The Loss of Green,” a woman’s former lover reappears to test her fidelity to a new life and marriage that, so far, have only produced a miscarriage. A limo driver in “Comfort” considers the nature of luxury and suffering as a ride turns sour and he becomes an unlikely knight to the rescue. The Zoetrope award-winning “Curled in the Bed of Love” is a dull story about (sigh) love in the time of AIDS, while “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is an episodic ramble through a woman’s two marriages and two children, posing as its ultimate issue the question of whether she will grant redemption to the husband who slipped into addiction. Another redemption is sought by the hairdresser in “Behold the Handmaid of the Lord,” who takes the cousin she betrayed on a national talk show to ask for forgiveness—but is a true apology possible anymore? Bordering on the sentimental, but often experimental enough to avoid it, Brady’s stories wrap all the old questions in new packaging: live, crisp prose and characters who genuinely seem to feel.
The plots may be familiar, but the sensibility is refreshingly different. A voice coming into its own.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-8203-2545-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their...
A collection of stories unified in theme—the struggles of women claiming independence for themselves—but wide-ranging in conception and form.
The women who populate this collection from the novelist and essayist Gay (Bad Feminist, 2014, etc.) are targets for aggressions both micro and macro, from the black scholar in “North Country” who receives constant unwelcome advances and questions of “Are you from Detroit?” to the sisters brutally held in captivity while teenagers in the bracing and subtle “I Will Follow You.” Gay savvily navigates the ways circumstances of gender and class alter the abuses: “Florida” is a cross-section of the women in a wealthy development, from the aimless, neglected white housewives to the Latina fitness trainer who’s misunderstood by them. The men in these stories sometimes come across as caricatures, archetypal violent misogynist-bigots like the wealthy white man playing dress-up with hip-hop culture and stalking the student/stripper in “La Negra Blanca.” But again, Gay isn’t given to uniform indictments: “Bad Priest” is a surprisingly tender story about a priest and the woman he has an affair with, and “Break All the Way Down” is a nuanced study of a woman’s urge for pain in a relationship after the loss of her son. Gay writes in a consistently simple style, but like a longtime bar-band leader, she can do a lot with it: repeating the title phrase in “I Am a Knife” evokes the narrator’s sustained experience with violence, and the title story satirizes snap judgments of women as “loose,” “frigid,” and “crazy” with plainspoken detail. When she applies that style to more allegorical or speculative tales, though, the stories stumble: “Requiem for a Glass Heart” is an overworked metaphorical study of fragility in relationships; “The Sacrifice of Darkness” is ersatz science fiction about the sun’s disappearance; “Noble Things” provocatively imagines a second Civil War but without enough space to effectively explore it.
Not every story works, but Gay is an admirable risk-taker in her exploration of women’s lives and new ways to tell their stories.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2539-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some—but also with the knowledge that...
Love among the ruins—and with Ethan Frome, tennis, martinis, and Starbucks on the set as well.
As often in his fiction, Aciman (Harvard Square, 2013, etc.) immerses readers in a milieu that is achingly sensuous—and sensual, too—with not much regard for pedestrian ideas of what constitutes whatever normal behavior is supposed to be. Even so, his characters are often beset by moral agony over the choices they make in following their hearts. In the case of Paul, a definitively sensitive man of fleetingly passing years, just about everything is a Proustian madeleine: Greek and Latin, the glint of Mediterranean sunlight, “the cooling scent of coffee from the roasting mill that seemed to welcome me no differently now than when I ran errands with my mother.” Then there is music, so elegantly alluded to in the title, and the memories of men and women who have fallen in his path and bed and sometimes imparted wisdom along the way; as an early object of desire says, knowingly, “It could be life or it could be a strip of wood that refuses to bend as it should.” Paul bends easily in his pursuits, broadly catholic in his affinities. Aciman’s portrait of him and his world is thoughtful, sympathetic, and never prurient; Paul is very much, as a friend of his remarks, like Sicily in having many identities and “all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.” He is not at all reprehensible, yet he is not blameless, either; Paul’s quest for self-awareness, to say nothing of his quest for pleasure, carries plenty of collateral damage. Most of it he bears himself, though; as he says, with knowing resignation, “I think everyone is wounded in their sex…I can’t think of one person who isn’t.”
An eminently adult look at desire and attachment, with all the usual regrets and then some—but also with the knowledge that such regret “is easy enough to live down.”Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14843-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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