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 of nine stories in which much of what's presented is dramatically unearned or simply dreary: Flannery O'Connor Award-winner Lorenzo writes mostly about dyspeptic women who are constitutionally unhappy with their situations and especially with the men in their lives. In the title piece, narrator Eulene travels with her husband Julien to her mother's house on the ocean. By the end of the overlong chronicle, she realizes that her only life's purpose has been to hurt her mother's feelingsn—and attack her values—but along the way, she's also done a good job of jolting everyone else out of their ordinary routines: ``I guess I married you to get rid of sex,'' she tells Julien. Likewise, in ``Peripheral Vision,'' a 30-ish wife hits her husband—a lawyer who commutes to the city every day—drawing blood, and otherwise nurtures her ``seesaw of anger'' through some business with her car and the cops. In ``Unconfirmed Invitations,'' daughter Sophie spends page after tedious page telling her parents she's running away to New York City; her father, a genial drinker and philanderer, and her mother, a sneak thief, are far more patient with her than most readers will be. Only two stories, ``Two Piano Players'' and ``Something Almost Invisible,'' provide much in the way of dramatic situation, the former by giving two girls on the edge of puberty a chance to roam about a small town, and the latter by forcing the usual weltschmerz narrator to track down the owner of a dead dog and help dispose of it. ``The natural outcome of caring is grief,'' says one character, but much too often these stories substitute free- floating aggravation for drama to jump-start the plots: they end not with a bang but a yawn.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8203-1704-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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
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