"The virginity of famous men" by Christine Sneed (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Stories from "Southern Review", "New England Review", "Ploughshares", "Literary Review", etc., all 20-30 pages long In the first piece, "Beach vacation", a wife and son go on holiday, the mother (who still considers herself attractive) aware of her son's popularity, the son surly. When a girl he knows suddenly leaves he quickly connects with a woman his mother's age. The mother tries to exert control - "She recognised that she being selfish but could not stop herself".

Differences in age, fame, wealth and beauty create insecurity in relationships - divorce and a beautiful person feature in nearly all the earlier stories. Here are some quotes -

• "Rejection is the relentless, powerful hazing that disables ninety-seven out of a hundred talented people" (p.40)
• "I adored her in spite of her prejudices and ignorance and selfishness. I also knew that she couldn't possibly love me" (p.66)
• "I didn't yet know what I was capable of. Most of us, either because we're lucky or we're cowards, never find out" (p.68)

There are no problems with the believability of the characters, or the quality of the observations. However, I preferred the stories on other themes. In "Five Room" (maybe my favourite piece) an opinionated, none too attractive teenager ends up helping an old blind man who's going through a break-up while her divorced mother tries to cement her own relationship. In the entertaining "Roger Weber would like to stay" a woman has a relationship with a ghost while having another with a man. Eventually she tells the man and dumps the ghost. "The new, all-true CV" is an autobiography inappropriate for its putative purpose, though a fun read.

"Whathisname" is ok. "Clear Conscience" isn't. Nor "Older sister" or "The Couplehood Julilee", in which a couple organise a fake wedding that might as well have been a real one. The final, title, piece revives the theme of fathers being attracted to son's girlfriends, and the mileau of [wannabe] movie people. The wannabe screen-writer son, Will, is working on an autobiographical piece that's unlikely to please his famous actor father. The son and his girlfriend have rented an apartment in Paris. His father visits for a weekend, the first time the two men have met for a while (they fell out over a woman they were both after). He splashes money to impress Jorie, the girlfriend - "Will could see something shift in his father's face, some decision being made about Jorie, that she was as susceptible as anybody to his charm" (p.289). Yeah. The story ends well.

Other reviews

• Jack Smith (This collection represents a compelling range of characters and provocative plots. ... The stories that make up this volume are powerful testaments to Sneed’s sharp sense of the nature of inwardness, of carefully delineated internal conflicts.)
• Kirkus Review (Though most stories stop short of promising hope, readers will find themselves invested in these worlds and lives. Tenderly portrayed and sharply observed. A rich collection.)
• Christi Clancy (Sneed focuses less on the pursuit of sex and love than on the more complicated matter of love’s fallout)
• Sally Shivnan (Sneed takes her characters to the brink of something at the end of each story, but the brink of what exactly can be hard to say. ... She crafts nuanced portraits of all sorts of people who never give up struggling to make sense of what they’re experiencing. Her characters work hard. They try to confide, they try to love, even when it doesn’t quite succeed.)