STORIES IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

by Yannick Murphy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 28, 1987

Murphy should have appended some kind of glossary to this debut volume of stories written in another language, since it's a lingo that mixes a vaguely Eastern inscrutability with a decidedly Western childlikeness. Murphy's girlish narrators often respond to death--the dominant concern here--with a strange insouciance. In ""The Slit""--which also appears in the first issue of Gordon Lish's new paperback magazine, The Quarterly--a young girl describes the funeral of her best friend, Jody, who fell from a window, but it's told with many deliberately weird euphemisms, added for anti-melodramatic effect. Immature observation fills out other memoiristic tales of childhood encounters with death: ""The Summer the Men Landed on the Moon"" (the title is meaningless) strings together disjointed recollections of a summer cottage by a lake and a neighbor whose son has recently died; in ""Where Dead Is Best,"" some kids try to connect with a dead man's spirit by playing dead in his abandoned house; and a girl sketches her grandmother's descent into senility, after her husband dies, in ""The Toys."" Kinky familial relations underlie ""The Headdress,"" in which the narrator remembers her brother using her for masturbation; ""Laws of Nature,"" in which a man tries to bully his wife and her best friend into a threesome; and ""Ball and Socket""--a daughter's quasi-incestual memories of her father. ""Red, Red,"" ""Mercury,"" and ""A Good Father,"" among others, are set in peculiar foreign surroundings, made all the more bizarre by Murphy's refusal (inability?) to evoke different cultures in detail. These 17 short prose pieces--one a brief paragraph long--try to shock with their casually violent erotica and exotica, but they mostly annoy with their strained seriousness and their overly laconic style.

Pub Date: May 28, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION