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SECONDS OF PLEASURE

Name: SECONDS OF PLEASURE
Author: Neil LaBute
ISBN: 0-8021-1785-6

STORIES

by Neil LaBute ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004

There’s precious little moral sense ballasting the unrelenting cruelty. Only a sadist, or a masochist, would read this...

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The dark prince of the American stage and indie cinema debuts with 20 baleful vignettes.

Only LaBute would call these “seconds of pleasure,” even ironically. Inches beneath the rambling bonhomie in the monologues and dialogues is the unflinching brutality of their casual betrayals and taboo-busting. “Anyway, it was good to see him again. Really, it was,” concludes a young woman after luring the father who abandoned her family into a motel room and seducing him. When he’s in a sunny mood, LaBute gives the patron whose car battery has run down outside a strip club a helping hand (“Open All Night”). When he’s coasting in neutral, he remakes fables like Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark” (“Perfect,” in which a wife’s tiny imperfection drives her husband crazy) or Eric Rohmer’s film Claire’s Knee (“Boo-Boo,” whose narrator can’t rest till he’s touched the scab on the heroine’s leg). More often, he’s thought of his own fiendish ways to unmask his characters’ slimy pretensions as they humiliate each other. A college student sweats to break up with his girlfriend on a tight deadline (“Spring Break”). A traveler flirts with a stranger in an airport knowing he’s going to have to ditch her within minutes (“Layover”). A flight attendant spots her current lover’s wife on a transatlantic flight (“Whitecap”). An amateur filmmaker recalls the first time he and a buddy screen-tested a prostitute for a special video (“Ravishing”). LaBute’s whiplash command of the ironic distance between his heroes’ self-excusing blather (only a Hollywood actor’s uncomfortable reunion with the “girl-slash-woman” he’d bedded and forgotten strikes a false note) is so uncanny that every story stings.

There’s precious little moral sense ballasting the unrelenting cruelty. Only a sadist, or a masochist, would read this poisoned volume through at a sitting. But, as LaBute might say, doesn’t that include us all?

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-8021-1785-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

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GREY AREA

AND OTHER STORIES

by Will Self ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1996

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Self's celebrated perversity (My Idea of Fun, 1994, etc.) largely goes on holiday in this second collection (after The Quantity Theory of Insanity, 1995). This time, nine stories (four of them previously published) remain close in theme to earlier work while falling well short of Self's mastery of the blackly comic. The first piece, ``Between the Conceits''—in which one of the only eight real people in London describes the rules of a game involving incessant manipulations of his ``people'' to gain advantage over his competitors—most closely approximates Self's knack for imagining a freakish society with disturbing echoes of the real one. Similarly, ``Chest'' conjures up a nightmarish England whose inhabitants are sickened by a constant, choking smog that leaves them dependent on inhalers and at risk of death if they tarry outside. Otherwise, these tales range from complete misses to insubstantial set pieces clustered around a single riveting detail. In ``Incubus,'' an intricately carved, magnificently phallic screen from the 17th century adorns an otherwise nondescript house (and story), casting a lusty spell on an aging philosophy professor and his adoring graduate student; in ``Inclusion,'' a psychoactive drug prepared from the corpses and fecal matter of bee mites is given a clandestine trial by a pharmaceutical company, with results that are disastrous but unremarkable; and in ``The End of the Relationship,'' the volume's raw but lifeless finale, a woman's despair over a rift with her boyfriend propels her into a series of encounters with couples at odds with each other. Evidence of a savage talent still exists in this mÇlange, but the mesmerizing quality of Self's earlier sordid, in-your-face images is too often absent—while what remains is pedestrian, if not downright dull. (Author tour)

Pub Date: March 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-87113-620-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995

Categories:

SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
ELAINE
by Will Self

- BOOK REVIEW
WHY READ
by Will Self

- BOOK REVIEW
WILL
by Will Self

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EMERALD CITY

AND OTHER STORIES

by Jennifer Egan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1996

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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.