A patchwork collection of 54 (mostly brief) stories, all previously uncollected and/or unpublished, by the late (191965) author of The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, and other classics of contemporary supernatural fiction. Jackson's talent was to find the ghoulish and disturbing just beneath the surface of the commonplace (her work has significantly influenced Stephen King's). Accordingly, a majority of these stories portray marital or domestic crises, cunningly raised to high levels of tension and, very often, terror. Though Lucifer himself shows up in a few (most memorably, ``The Smoking Room,'' where he's outwitted by a calculating coed), Jackson's evil figures are, much more often, enigmatic men who prey on or otherwise disappoint the women who adore them (``The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith''), children who intuit odd occurrences and presences their elders cannot perceive (``Summer Afternoon''), and nice old ladies whose charming eccentricities mask their darker purposes (``The Possibility of Evil''). There's rather a lot of inchoate work here (such as a weak piece of romantic medievalism, ``Lord of the Castle''), and many of the bland titles were obviously only preliminary. Of the unpublished stories, best are such Saki-like models of compact menace as ``The Mouse,'' ``What a Thought,'' and ``Mrs. Anderson''—as well as two of Jackson's most amusing pictures of embattled motherhood (``Arch-Criminal'' and ``Alone in a Den of Cubs''). The uncollected pieces, many of them first published in popular magazines, are nevertheless generally much stronger. They feature several ingenious premises (``The Wishing Dime,'' ``Journey with a Lady,'' and especially ``The Omen,'' a complex chiller beautifully developed from its fairy-tale-like beginning), vividly realistic characterizations (``Mrs. Melville Makes a Purchase''), and at least one indisputable classic: ``One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,'' in which Jackson records with virtuosic understatement the cruel and unusual avocation shared by a devoted suburban couple. Even at a bit below the level of her best work, it's nice to have Jackson back again.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-10303-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Drab, elitist victimhood dressed up in glittery prose.
A third collection from Somerset Maugham–winner Simpson (Four Bare Legs in a Bed, 1992, etc.): nine bitter stories, many loosely interconnected, about upper-middle-class British women overburdened by family.
In “Golden Apples,” 17-year-old Jade wanders her suburban London neighborhood, scoffing at its bourgeois trappings and imagining how her life will be different She is particularly critical of her mother, a professional woman everyone else praises as “so amazing, what she managed to pack into twenty-four hours.” Then by chance Jade encounters the author’s first of many overwhelmed, overweight, falling-apart, stay-at-home moms whose intelligence is atrophying under the pressure of husbands and children. Listening to the despair of this unnamed woman, whose child has a bean stuck up her nose, Jade begins to appreciate her own mother’s elegant competence. Jade reappears only fleetingly in other tales, as babysitter or daughter, but her energy and blind hopefulness haunt the remaining pages, in which adult women lack anything resembling hope. Some can’t talk to each other, despite their shared experiences, because they have lost the ability to speak for themselves (“Café Society”); others, like Dorrie in the title piece, are so entirely dedicated to their families that they have no space left for self. The men are nonentities at best, and Simpson’s depiction of the children is even more disturbing. Considering their offsprings’ spoiled, whining, devouring natures, it’s no wonder Simpson’s mothers are miserable. (When Dorrie sees “the gleam in his eyes and teeth,” her son’s hungry, animal quality is apparent.) The several tales about working women offer no joy rides either. Jade’s highly efficient mother, Nicola, muses on her life with forced self-satisfaction during a long business dinner honoring “Burns and the Bankers,” while, in “Wurstigkeit,” two women sneak away from their professional lives for a secret, decadent shopping spree. But real happiness eludes them all.
Drab, elitist victimhood dressed up in glittery prose.Pub Date: June 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41109-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
This bleak debut features violence and abuse so unrelenting that they quickly become routine. Blanca is in the hospital after a suicide attempt. Sections telling of her adulthood and attempts by the hospital staff to help her are interspersed with the sad story of her early life, beginning with her journey from Puerto Rico to New York City as a child. Benevolent adults are as believable as Santa Claus in Blanca's world. Her grandmother Paquita beats her often. Her father sexually molests her and threatens to kill her if she tells anyone. When she and Paquita return to Puerto Rico quite suddenly, Blanca first has some trouble readjusting, although she is once again thrust into a familiarly abusive environment. A bookworm, Blanca incurs the uneducated Paquita's wrath. In Puerto Rico she undergoes an illegal abortion and, at 17, begins an affair with a married man whose wife confronts her—not to challenge her but to say that should she decide to prosecute her lover for statutory rape, she would testify, since she too was 17 when she took up with him. Eventually they wed, and Blanca has a daughter. She divorces him after four years, when—in a dose of unexpected magical realism—an acacia instructs her to do so. Blanca is not a quick learner, though, and she falls in love with her boss at the Department of Justice, another married man. After graduating from college, she and her daughter, Ta°na, head to Boston, where Blanca will study at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Ta°na experiences her mother's linguistic confusion in reverse, Blanca feels confused and lost, and pretty soon she decides to commit suicide—no surprise, since the book ends back where it started. Aside from the sparse hospital scenes, which stand out because they are more tangibly detailed, this suffers from an overheated style and adds little to the literary exploration of displacement. Multiculturalism cannot disguise a lack of originality.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55885-125-9
Page Count: 199
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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