It's a mess (the concluding episode is especially disjointed and truncated), but Grandmother's sensual energies and fluent...
Another inveterate yarnspinner dominates this chaotically structured yet frequently entertaining third novel (Blessed Is the Fruit, 1997, etc.) from American-born Antoni, who grew up in the Bahamas.
The place is the village of Chaguarameras on the island of Corpus Christi, and the storyteller is the (unnamed) eponymous Grandmother, a 96-year-old powerhouse who regales her young grandson Johnny with lavish extended tales of her commercial (and, coincidentally, heavily sexual) adventures. Most of them occurred during WWII, when American soldiers were stationed on Corpus Christi, the whorehouse trade thrived, and Grandmother matched wits with two importunate adversaries and admirers: a self-styled "King" (of a traveling carnival) who tried to dupe her into financing the search for a sunken pirate ship laden with treasure, and a white-suited Kentucky "Colonel" who helped her build a fast-food pizza enterprise, then later marketed Grandmother herself—as calypso singer "Lady Lobo." Neither of them is quite what he seems, and there's a similar abundance of unreality in Grandmother's hair-raising stories about a prowling "tiger that liked to eat cheese," a gorgeous seductress who murders and mutilates her lovers, an adopted girl and a "slaveboy" who shape-shift respectively into an iguana and an anaconda (the novel’s best sequence), and even a story set in "the old old time" of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Spanish conquistadors (which Grandmother claims to remember clearly). All this is more than a bit oppressively lush, but this time out Antoni reins in the Caribbean patois, and offers several delicious contrasts between the islanders' uninhibited carnality and American sexual timidity ("where . . . [the U.S. soldiers] came from, it was against the law even to play with yourself before the age of twenty-one").
It's a mess (the concluding episode is especially disjointed and truncated), but Grandmother's sensual energies and fluent loquacity make this Antoni's most accessible and enjoyable fiction nevertheless.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1687-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
The impulse to shed our birth families and make our own, and the contrary tug of blood that lures us back to our origins, are the emotionally charged matter of these ten linked stories, set in North Carolina Arkansas, and Texas, by a talented new Arkansas writer. Their common bond is protagonist and narrator Richard, whom we first meet (in “Why I’m Talking”) as an eight-year-old who stops speaking when his mother attempts suicide, and is appeased by bonding with the teenaged daughter of his grandfather’s black mistress, as well as with his unregenerate father’s new girlfriend. The complex folly of his parents’ on-again/off-again marriage is disclosed to him a few years later (in “What Men Love For”). Subsequent pieces depict Richard’s own troubled relationships with girls and women (“At the Edge of the New World”), fatherhood and marital failures (“Everything Quiet Like Church,” “When Love Gets Worn”), and partial reconciliations with the crazy people who gave him life and never can seem to relax their grip on him (“What We Are Up Against” and the resonant, concluding title story). There’s some unavoidable repetition, and a couple of particularly shapeless stories (such as “Corporal Love”) that amass anecdotes from various stages of Richard’s early life. But the collection’s strong points are the vivid characterizations of Richard’s parents (seen only briefly, but always to telling effect) and firm control of a tone of reflective melancholy that exactly suits Phillips’s empathetic portrayal of a thoughtful man trying to understand where he comes from and what he’s made of. “We were a hard people,” Richard muses, “who counted time by tragedies and who took a storyteller’s pleasure in reshaping our sadness.” Just so; and that’s why we take a reader’s pleasure in sharing it.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04715-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Gaitskill's second collection is a return to the themes of her first, Bad Behavior (1988): Bad girls misbehave and end up as profiles in sexual pathology. For all their naughty sex talk, there's very little pleasure—Gaitskill's women are too brittle and nervous, forever exhausted by their unusual tastes, to take much relish in life. The familial origins of her troubled women are well illustrated in ``Tiny, Smiling Daddy,'' a portrait of a father disturbed by the course of his daughter's life, from sweet, beautiful girl to snarling teen and then to grown-up lesbian rehashing their relationship in a national magazine. A male perspective in two stories is equally grim: The twentysomething fellow who returns to Iowa to visit his injured mother uses the occasion to manipulate his girlfriend back in San Francisco; more troubling is the drunken confession by a middle-aged businessman on an airplane to his shocked female seatmate—as a teenager he participated in a gang rape. Quite a few pieces concern women in their late 30s, often bisexual, who seem incapable of maintaining relationships. The writer in ``The Dentist'' becomes obsessed with seducing her dumpy dentist, a man made uncomfortable by her sexual innuendos. In ``The Wrong Thing,'' the narrator is, at first, dismayed by a younger man reluctant to have sex with her and retreats into an affair with a woman who likes only S&M role- playing. ``The Blanket'' explores a similar notion: An older woman energizes her younger lover by exploring their fantasies. The finest piece is ``Orchid,'' the discussions of two college housemates who hook up years later in Seattle and seem to prove that those in the so-called helping professions—she's a social worker, he's a psychopharmacologist—are usually in need of much help themselves. Gaitskill continues to explore the margins of human sexuality in stories distinguished by their strange terrain rather than by their exceptional skill.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80856-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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