Bizarre.
A debut collection of short stories by Quatro that's more confusing than profound.
A married woman tells her mother about her phone-sex relationship with another man; the same woman returns home with her husband to find her dead lover in their bed and watches as her husband lies down beside him; a grueling race is held in which each entrant must carry a metal statue with an erect penis; a woman dying of melanoma struggles to survive, and her husband wrestles with his conscience; an old woman, determined to mail a letter to the president, embarks on a final journey to the post office; the married woman winds up having phone sex and ignores her children; a young girl, embarrassed by her quadriplegic mother, is forced by her grandmother to go to a pool party; other stories center around a deaf man who becomes a cult leader and a young man who has a sinkhole. Quatro’s stories range from the ridiculously strange to the seemingly normal, but there’s certainly nothing ordinary about this darkly themed, graphically sexual book. The stories, set in the area surrounding Lookout Mountain, Ga., rip apart the moral, familial and religious conventions of modern society. Nothing is sacred to the author, who possesses a prolific imagination but fails to connect with the average reader. The stories are interwoven in a manner that makes it extremely challenging for the reader to link the events and the characters, and the writing is often stilted and difficult to follow, at best. Readers who appreciate avant-garde prose and odd humor may find the stories appealing, but the author’s meandering style and strange content will prove too unconventional for others.
Bizarre.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2075-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
