An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short-story forums—The New Yorker, Grants, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 0385491115
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
The author of the novel The Invisible Circus (1994) collects 11 somewhat strained stories that seem suited to the glossy venues in which they first appeared (e.g., GQ and Mademoiselle): They're slick if utterly predictable lifestyle studies that entertain very conventional notions of conformity and wildness. Most often, Egan's financially successful protagonists yearn for the simplicity or adventure of their previous lives. In ``Why China?,'' an unhappy stock trader—who's being investigated for improprieties—takes his family to remote China on vacation partly to recapture his former bohemian self. Similarly, ``The Watch Trick'' compares the lives of two army buddies, one settled into a stable married life, the other still living from scam to scam. The title story concerns the other side of the dream, when desire still motivates the young and ambitious—in this case, a photographer's assistant and his wannabe-model girlfriend. It's sort of a morality tale (being beautiful isn't always enough) for the Seventeen set. Egan's stronger pieces are told from a young girl's point of view and usually involve some sort of small, if intense, revelation: discovering that her father is unfaithful to her long-suffering mother (``Puerta Vallarta''); that she can redeem her older brother from his guilt over their mother's death (``One Piece''); that her mother's second husband is really a nice guy (``Sacred Heart''); and that maybe life isn't so bad as a ``watcher'' rather than a ``doer'' of wild stunts. Egan also worries a lot about older women cast aside by their successful husbands: the ex-wife of the investment banker who long condescended to the woman passed around by her husband's friends only to find that he too had been with her (``Passing the Hat''); and the 32-year-old divorcÇe of ``Spanish Winter'' who sleeps around Spain, giving up on life until she hooks up with a shady investor on the run. The lure of adventure and the lust for wealth in Egan's schematic little fictions are just yuppie fantasies; she seldom gets beyond the clichÇs of money and personal crisis.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48212-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The heroine of this third and decreasingly engaging installment in the McDade Cycle (Lily, 1992; Looking for Lily, not reviewed) is a young woman who gets into trouble in small-town Texas of the 1890's as she follows her heart rather than her head. As the story begins, Dellie, Lily's younger sister, has been married for two years to Daniel O'Barr, a local farmer and lawyer. Daniel is kind and generous but often absent, leaving Dellie restless and bored. At a picnic celebrating a reunion of local Confederate veterans, she meets handsome Andy Ashland, her father's tenant farmer, who delivers a fiery speech in favor of Populism. Four days later, her father, dying of cancer, commits suicide. Dellie, who had married Daniel in part to escape Papa's harsh ways, finds it difficult to grieve. Increasingly attracted to Andy, she starts attending local Populist meetings to hear him speak, begins writing for the Populist paper, and (when her husband is out of town) she spends time with Andy and his two children. Andy is married, but his wife is hospitalized in an Austin asylum; he is also heavily in debt, especially to local merchant Louis Bassist, whom he accuses of usury. Soon deeply smitten, Dellie follows Andy to Austin for a tryst and decides to divorce Daniel. When Andy leaves town, she impulsively sets Bassist's store on fire and flees to Louisiana, hoping to meet up with her lover there. When he fails to come, she returns to McDade to give herself up. Dellie and Daniel reconcile. She's tried and imprisoned for arson, finding some consolation in becoming an ardent Suffragist. In always nicely evoked period settings, Dellie tries hard to be strong, sexy, and politically progressive, but she never quite comes alive either as a ``new woman'' or a heartwrenching romantic.
Pub Date: March 31, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-103-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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