Sadly, stories with a potential too insufficiently realized to deliver sustenance.
From novelist Quinn (High Strung, 2003), an oddly flat first collection that deals mostly with overly familiar domestic issues.
In “Dough,” a young woman with a “peaceful father” and a mother who went overnight from showgirl to paralegal, spends time with her grandmother, who has “rosebud nostrils” and is suffering from dementia. Her mother comes by one evening and catches the girl in flagrante with her boyfriend, a bread maker. Yet the story is too quiet to be memorable. A woman’s experience of rape is associated in her mind with CNN’s reports of American astronauts, ideas that merge in a conclusion that doesn’t work (“Back on Earth”). In “Endurance Tests,” a divorced mother connects her young son’s episodes of playing dead after his dog dies with the endurance tests she and a girlfriend tried with each other when they young, concluding that nothing was enough to prepare them for adult life. The inconclusive “Shed This Life” follows a woman whose parents died when she was in high school as she now leaves a boyfriend she met in the dentist’s office (where she works) after she let him know she’s pregnant. Dalton’s language is too pat (“Ted is looking at me like a man not quite recovered from Novocain, mouth breathing and he doesn’t even know it”), her character’s motivations unclear. “How to Clean Your Apartment” gives us a young woman trying to break up with a boyfriend while drinking whiskey and preparing to throw out clothes, gifts, junk. It’s saved from dullness by witty index subheads (“Screening calls: brief arguments for, 7.61”; “Therapy, cheaper alternatives to, 9:07”) but closes with the same old ending. The overlong title story gives an account of the narrator’s breakup with her boyfriend, told in tandem with the saga of her parents’ separation, her mother’s depression and her grandmother’s controlling temperament. Dalton gives each equal weight, robbing her tale of drama and emotion.
Sadly, stories with a potential too insufficiently realized to deliver sustenance.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-7055-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A first collection with fewer insights than clichÇs. Five of the ten stories here feature Alex Fader, a spoiled teenager whose father died young of lung cancer. The strong piece of the five is ``A Different Kind of Imperfection'' (one of two that originally appeared in The New Yorker), in which Alex comes home from college at Christmas and tries to understand the parent he never knew by reading his father's notes in the margins of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The four other Alex tales render rather dully uninteresting moments of his youth, as in ``The Dark Piano,'' which shows young, rebellious Alex having his TV privileges taken away from him and then scheming to watch nevertheless. The remaining five stories are dominated by shallow and often arrogant male protagonists who prey on weak females. In ``The Hot Dog War,'' Walter schemes to pick up a girl at a fast- food joint, only to lose her to a friend; while in ``Nondestructive Testing,'' the same man, a bank employee, tries to woo the firm's pudgy receptionist with chocolate (``Women were like campfires to Walter: warm and comforting in the midst of the wilderness, but if you didn't keep an eye on them you might end up engulfed in flames''). In the title piece, an overbearing yet cowardly man gets off on entrapping a woman who's being hounded by another man; ``Life Under Optimum Conditions'' depicts two yuppies getting intimate by sharing stories of their seediest sexual encounters; and in ``Tearing at the Grapes,'' two other equally unprepossessing young professionals who don't really like each other wearily give in to the need to be with someone else. Limited in perspective and lacking a firm voice, with a quality of writing that doesn't help.
Pub Date: May 23, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03767-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
Nine eerie tales mainly concerning supernatural, sometimes horrifying, conundrums confronted by (usually) contemporary American Jews—in a second collection (Stories of an Imaginary Childhood, 1992—not reviewed) from the author of the dark, occasionally diverting fantasy novel Sandman's Dust (1986). Many of these stories sport a surprise—and often a nasty one- -at the close. In ``Gematria,'' a precious-stones dealer in Manhattan discovers that the special kind of emerald demanded by a (literally) murderous female customer is not what he'd supposed. Bouncy Alan Lapidus—in the most amusing piece here—plunges energetically into what he's sure will be the successful pursuit of ``The Big Metzia'' (bargain) in destitute but trade-needy Russia; he whoops it up in the former Evil Empire with the misty aid of a bewildering factotum, the all-knowing but—as it turns out— startlingly two-faced Igor. In ``Old Words for New,'' Professor Phragus, an Egyptologist, makes an otherworldly discovery in the cellar of an ancient temple. Other stories offer stirring reminders of the Holocaust: An assimilated Jewish lawyer ponders his insulated life, confronts a clammy link to a past of death and terror, and watches a silent film of Himmler messily killing pet chickens. The founder of ``The Library of Moloch''—survivor stories on tape—dies, jealous of the survivors' faith, in flames. The author also indulges in some theological cutups in ``The Devil and the Dutchman,'' in which a rabbi has a discussion with a rather tentative, bothered devil who's brought up short by the rabbi's demand: ``You want to meet the big fella?...Can't do it...I've got a few questions I'd like to ask myself.'' Bukiet's mordant twists and turns of invention have the squirmy tone of science-fiction mags, and his bitter, however admirable, sentiments are set in somewhat shrill hyperbole. Overall, then: readable tales of uneven quality.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-100083-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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