Gilchrist's fifth collection (Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, 1989, etc.) is the familiar mix of dizzy lyricism, gossipy southernisms, and erotic longing that we've come to expect from her—though fans will be pleased with the continuing chronicle of the life of alter ego Rhoda Manning. ``An orgasm is an orgasm and it's a hell of a lot better than Xanax,'' Rhoda says in ``A Statue of Aphrodite,'' the book's opener about her visit with Dr. Brevard, an obstetrician who falls in love with his patient after reading one of her magazine articles; the search for orgasmic love is still Gilchrist's overriding theme, but her 50-ish heroine, introduced in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), is now more cautious and less frenetic. There is also an elegiac quality to the collection: ``Paris'' is a slice-of-life about Rhoda overseas, her knockabout credo undercut by the death of a young man in an explosion set by the Italian Mafia; ``Joyce'' is a tribute to a one-legged university teacher (Rhoda is one of his students), a teacher of Joyce too good for the mundane world who smokes himself to death; and ``Among the Mourners'' is about a poet suicide. On a lighter note, Gilchrist has a lot of fun at the expense of the health-care industry and its byzantine insurance scams as Rhoda writes letters to Blue Cross (``The Uninsured''); of the New Orleans poetry and jazz subculture (``The Raintree Street Bar and Washateria, A Fable''); and of her old standby Miss Crystal from Victory Over Japan (1984), now afflicted with allergies (``Too Much Rain, or, The Assault of the Mold Spores''). Some of these stories are as good as poetry slams, others spend too much time in the fields of dipsy-doodle ditziness. But even so, it's one of Gilchrist's best as her characters, deep into middle age, begin to take account of lasting things.
Pub Date: May 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-31442-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
IN THE NEWS
Thirty-plus ``short-shorts'' hover around several common incidents—a sister's suicide, small-town women navigating lives of depressing claustrophobia. The author of two novels (Strange Angels, 1993) and a previous collection (Bend This Heart, 1989), Agee shows she can brew up a potent moonshine that combines literary surrealism with country & western jukebox wisdom. The problem is the hangover such prose can bestow. In ``My Last Try,'' the language strains for effect: ``That day the sun shone mean and glittery as a knife in my throat. Like a Broadway musical of my life, The Phantom of the Opera gone bad, and I was expected on stage any minute, with the mask covering whatever ugliness I'd been up to.'' Yet once the author gets her engines running, the story becomes a moving portrayal of a middle- aged woman's adultery: ``I felt tired that month, going from one to the other, like a mother with two sick children or a person with two jobs.'' Meanwhile, two longer works, ``Dead Space'' and ``There Has to be a Beginning,'' show up the thinness of the smaller efforts. Indeed, few of the short-shorts work—though ``The Change Jar'' is an exception: In just two pages, it manages to produce the impression that we know a disppointed man's life, inside and out. But Agee's best work comes in glimpses from inside flawed stories— a portion of ``Cata,'' the middle of ``The Jesus Barber Shop''- -leaving the impression that perhaps the problem is with the form itself, which turns Agee skittish. A few of these pieces (in this latest addition to the Coffee- To-Go Short-Short Story series) provide jolts of recognition, but too many end up feeling like writing exercises: as cryptic as runes, they neither rise nor converge.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56689-032-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
A first collection of nine stories in which much of what's presented is dramatically unearned or simply dreary: Flannery O'Connor Award-winner Lorenzo writes mostly about dyspeptic women who are constitutionally unhappy with their situations and especially with the men in their lives. In the title piece, narrator Eulene travels with her husband Julien to her mother's house on the ocean. By the end of the overlong chronicle, she realizes that her only life's purpose has been to hurt her mother's feelingsn—and attack her values—but along the way, she's also done a good job of jolting everyone else out of their ordinary routines: ``I guess I married you to get rid of sex,'' she tells Julien. Likewise, in ``Peripheral Vision,'' a 30-ish wife hits her husband—a lawyer who commutes to the city every day—drawing blood, and otherwise nurtures her ``seesaw of anger'' through some business with her car and the cops. In ``Unconfirmed Invitations,'' daughter Sophie spends page after tedious page telling her parents she's running away to New York City; her father, a genial drinker and philanderer, and her mother, a sneak thief, are far more patient with her than most readers will be. Only two stories, ``Two Piano Players'' and ``Something Almost Invisible,'' provide much in the way of dramatic situation, the former by giving two girls on the edge of puberty a chance to roam about a small town, and the latter by forcing the usual weltschmerz narrator to track down the owner of a dead dog and help dispose of it. ``The natural outcome of caring is grief,'' says one character, but much too often these stories substitute free- floating aggravation for drama to jump-start the plots: they end not with a bang but a yawn.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8203-1704-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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