THE WOMAN WHO CUT OFF HER LEG AT THE MAIDSTONE CLUB

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THE WOMAN WHO CUT OFF HER LEG AT THE MAIDSTONE CLUB

Name: THE WOMAN WHO CUT OFF HER LEG AT THE MAIDSTONE CLUB
Author: Julia Slavin
ISBN: 0-8050-6085-5

AND OTHER STORIES

by Julia Slavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 1999

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A debut collection of 13 rather creepy stories, most describing ordinary people who undergo extraordinarily bizarre events. While not exactly a surrealist, Slavin has a warped sense of humor and enjoys rubbing the reader’s nose in her wit. What’s surprising is the ease with which she draws one into her gags, which are fantastic rather than symbolic and carry themselves off with good grace. The title story is typical of the collection as a whole: it describes a crusty middle-aged WASP who becomes involved with a Jewish real-estate developer—mainly because of his interest in her family connections—and chooses to (further) scandalize her crowd by amputating her own leg (with a Cartier knife) at the local country club. In “Swallowed Whole,” we—re given a new variant on the sex-hungry housewife tale, in which a suburban matron becomes so infatuated with the boy who mows her lawn that she swallows him whole and carries on an affair with him in the privacy of her own stomach. “Dentaphilia” describes the travails of a young woman who grows teeth all over her body and eventually tires of the process, while “Blighted” tells of another woman’s unhappy relations with the oak tree that falls onto her house. Some of the stories are more straightforward: “Covered” concerns a middle-aged man trying to cope with the death of his mother and the slow realization that he has failed in his career; and “Rare Is a Cold Red Center” portrays an alcoholic waitress’s disappointment with her own life. Plenty of domestic angst is available, as in “Pudding” (about a middle-aged Soccer Mom’s discontent at the direction her family is headed in). Purposefully weird but sharp: Slavin has a careful ear and a good eye for detail—even if her tastes run to the baroque. Despite the outlandishness of her constructions, there is a precision to her narration that’s remarkable.

Pub Date: July 7, 1999

ISBN: 0-8050-6085-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

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A PERFECT SILENCE

by Alba Ambert ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1995

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This bleak debut features violence and abuse so unrelenting that they quickly become routine. Blanca is in the hospital after a suicide attempt. Sections telling of her adulthood and attempts by the hospital staff to help her are interspersed with the sad story of her early life, beginning with her journey from Puerto Rico to New York City as a child. Benevolent adults are as believable as Santa Claus in Blanca's world. Her grandmother Paquita beats her often. Her father sexually molests her and threatens to kill her if she tells anyone. When she and Paquita return to Puerto Rico quite suddenly, Blanca first has some trouble readjusting, although she is once again thrust into a familiarly abusive environment. A bookworm, Blanca incurs the uneducated Paquita's wrath. In Puerto Rico she undergoes an illegal abortion and, at 17, begins an affair with a married man whose wife confronts her—not to challenge her but to say that should she decide to prosecute her lover for statutory rape, she would testify, since she too was 17 when she took up with him. Eventually they wed, and Blanca has a daughter. She divorces him after four years, when—in a dose of unexpected magical realism—an acacia instructs her to do so. Blanca is not a quick learner, though, and she falls in love with her boss at the Department of Justice, another married man. After graduating from college, she and her daughter, Ta°na, head to Boston, where Blanca will study at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Ta°na experiences her mother's linguistic confusion in reverse, Blanca feels confused and lost, and pretty soon she decides to commit suicide—no surprise, since the book ends back where it started. Aside from the sparse hospital scenes, which stand out because they are more tangibly detailed, this suffers from an overheated style and adds little to the literary exploration of displacement. Multiculturalism cannot disguise a lack of originality.

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 1-55885-125-9

Page Count: 199

Publisher: Arte Público

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

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COLD SNAP

STORIES

by Thom Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 1995

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Winner and still champion Jones takes this one on points. His second collection (The Pugilist at Rest, 1993) of rock-hard stories goes the distance, surviving on adrenaline, killer instinct, and artistry. Most of these ten ready-to-rumble stories have appeared in major magazines (The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire), so some of the edges have been smoothed, but Jones's relentlessly existential protagonists are as manic as ever: The jittery hustlers, gonzo hopheads, and Dex-mad chatterers engage us viscerally, as do the sad zombies who drool through Haldol and other psychotropic drugs. Jones is a walking physician's desk manual, frequently indulging his medical obsessions. A number of pieces concern doctors, many of them burned out by prolonged exposure to Third World horror. In the title story, ``a bleak post-African depression'' engulfs a doctor back in the States, where he's lost his license to practice and where his self-lobotomized sister wastes away in an institution. Like many of Jones's hypersensitive protagonists, this one uses the weather as a barometer of his internal mood swings; relief comes from a quick game of Russian roulette. ``Pain and trouble'' dog the weary old-timer of ``Superman, My Son,'' whose 40-ish son has just come out of a manic episode. In Africa, a copywriter—legendary for his ability to overcome ``donor weariness''—sets off on a pill- popping jag (``Quicksand''), while a doctor from New Zealand drowns his cynicism in booze (``Way Down Deep in the Jungle''). The suicidal duet of ``I Need a Man to Love Me'' probes ``the eternal vortex of hell'' where death is relief from a life spent in a wheelchair or as a probable lifer in jail. The gym rats, disgruntled marines, and aging pickpockets who people Jones's stories are all desperate for moments of solace, if not a glimmer of transcendence. Raw, powerful, and pulpy: an intense volume that's like staring at a gaping wound, something making it so you can't—or don't want to—look away.