Stories from Agni, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, BASS 2012, etc. She's prepared to sacrifice credibility for the sake of symbolic structure, but for me the symbolism isn't worth it.
- Tenderfoot - The flat of Bobby (a teacher, separated) overlooks the studio of a self-employed pedicurist Paige (a childless army widow). While he's having his first pedicure done (which excites him) there's a flashback to when he and his ex, Renee, passed an accident and he didn't want to stop, which led to a succession of arguments. Out of the blue Renee arrives by taxi and knocks at his flat door. She sees him, enters the studio and they go off together. We learn that Paige knows he's been watching her. He'd unwittingly vocalised the flashback so she knows everything, including Renee's worry that there might have been a child in the car. Paige feels guilty that he didn't try harder to stop her husband joining the army.
If he had been excited he wouldn't have fallen asleep in the chair. Not much of a story anyway. - Dream Children - Willa looks after the 4 infants of a family. She finds 3 paintings/drawings of deformed infants, done by the father. The dentist opposite, a family friend, is being evicted. Willa has a natural remedy to calm the dentist. She has another traditional remedy to cure the youngest child's fever. The father says he did the artwork to ward off tragedy.
- Castle 4 - Zeph Finn (regional anesthesist, elligible bachelor) works in the Castle (a hospital in old buildings. 3 entrances). He talks to patients before, during and after ops. Victoria runs the gift-shop/cafe there. Joe and Acelle use Zeph's flat to meet. Acelle's 45 y.o. father, Hector, befriends 60 y.o. Victoria who starts selling the sculpture of Acelle's sister, lauching her career in a small way. Joe cuts a deeply buried twig from Acelle's thigh. The wound goes bad and Zeph makes it better, complementing Joe's surgical work with a pen-knife. Zeph marries a patient who has a week to live. Victoria and Hector become a couple.
Zeph's various conversations - light or very serious - are interesting. What does the rest of the story do? It builds a credible world around what would otherwise be too sentimental a plot, I guess. - Stone - It begins "She had come south from New York City to live with a small family in a stone house in a flat town. There was lots of wildlife too. She wasn't much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companionship, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool". A little later, there's more narrator intervention - "Now Ingrid played Sorry! with her nephew's five-year-old daughter, Chloe, exactly the age that her own son had been when disease snatched him from her ... well, wouldn't that be synchronous. In fact, her little boy had been only four". She's 74. She's there for 3 months to help her nephew Chris with his start-up. She had to leave a dying friend, Allegra, behind. "Happiness lengthens time. Every day seemed as long as a novel. Every night a double feature. Every week a lifetime, a muted lifetime, a lifetime in which sadness, always wedged under her breast like a doorstop, lost some of its bite.". I don't get the gushy ending where [Ingrid thinks?] Chris wants her to stay and fancies her.
- Her Cousin Jamie - Old friends Fern and Barbara meet as usual at the annual teachers's convention. "Fern in her fifties had a broad, unlined brow, clear gray eyes, a mobile mouth. She was fit, and her blondish hair was curly and short, and she wore expensive pants and sweaters in forest colours: moss, bark, mist ... Really, she should have been considered handsome; she might even have been admired. But her athletic shoulders had a way of shruffing and those muscular lips a way of grimacing that said she expected to be overlooked". She tell the story of her white cousin's affair when she was young with a much older, black, touring lecturer. The lecturer died while having sex with her. Jamie went to the funeral, felt guilty, married a boring maths teacher. Fern's jealous.
- Blessed Harry - Scattered, numerous details about a family, with events that could have developed into a plot, but don't. This is from the PoV of the wife - a nurse - "This portrait would disappear when the last of them underwent the physiological necessity of individual extinction, when the last memory of the last of them was gone. Then these two generations of Flaxbaums would fade from history, taking with them all their supplying and relying and self-denial and dissatisfaction and gratitude. Life and death? They were incidental, in her opinion, though of course she deplored suffering. But what counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you."
- Puck - Rennie's antinques shop is a place where respectable people can sell family treasures or buy untraceable presents for lovers. Ophelia brings in a statue of Puck which was in the room where she used to make love to a lost lover. When the statue's sold, Ophelia wonders whether the buyer was the lover. Rennie assures her he wasn't, breaking her confidentiality rules.
- Assisted Living - Rennie again. Muffy buys an expensive bracelet. Stu begins to drop her off each day at Rennie's shop. Muffie falls. Back from hospital she wants to list her possessions. She says that Rennie is her best friend. Then she breaks her arm. Then her hip. Rennie thinks that Stu's been selling off her jewellery.
- What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers - Gabrielle, 52 and childless, a concierge, has suddenly become a fundraiser against female circumcision. She organises events where Celene, a victim, mother of 3, bears witness and big-breasted Dr Gouda talks. The slide show is gory. When Celene's male partner leaves her, Gabriella and Celene share a bed - for convenience? When Celene can't make an event, she gets beautiful unmarried mother of 5, Minata, to substitute for her. While watching, Gabrielle breaks some bones. Oversexed Celene exploits the situation, befriending the males who helped at the event. Later she suggests to a blushing Gabriella that she should go to Celene.
- The Golden Swan - Bella and Robin, female cousins, are on a Caribbean cruise paid for by their grandpa - a graduation present. They're both overweight with little or no experience with men. The ship, "The Golden Swan" has a library and a 24 hour buffet. Bella goes off food. On the final night she sneaks onto the staff deck. She sees a woman breast-feeding. Back in their cabin, Robin has returned dishevelled. They each keep secret what they've done.
- Cul-de-sac - The 1st-person narrator is one of 4 neighbours who Daphna tries to drop into on Wednesdays. They all try to avoid her. She's 45, and boasts about the importance of her husband (61) and 3 children (born in Jerusalem). She's slightly deranged. The family leave. Daphna's boasts prove to be true. The narrator's worried she won't sell the house - Daphna's family put up with a lot. She decides not to accept a marriage proposal.
- Deliverance - Mimi's pretty - a divorcee with 3 grown kids. She's taken on by a soup kitchen in a church basement to replace Donna, who's going on maternity leave. Some of the clients have mental issues. Mimi tries to cure them of their demons using gerbils. It seems to work. Donna's impressed.
- Fishwater - Lance's Aunt Toby, 60, writes fictohistoriographia (adding unrefutable details to history). She brought him up when his parents died. Her admirer Franz is married. Using her royalties Toby and Lance move house. She starts her next book, about how Romano-Britons went to North America in 410. Her publisher says she's being too outlandish. When Franz becomes a widower he comes up with some archeological evidence to support her. Lance, who has no memory of his true parents, begins to think that Toby and Franz are his parents. Franz moves in with them.
- Wait and See - Lyle has a mutation inherited from his black sperm-donor father (his white mother had deliberately let mixed-race be possible). He can see beyond the light spectrum. His mother's attracted to their black doctor - "She kissed him then, and she caressed his hip with her knee, a gesture that cannot be achieved unless both parties are lying on their sides facing each other. They happened to be lying on their sides facing each other - Lyle was at school - and so the caress impossible under other circumstances was now possible, probable, necessary, unavoidable, though who would want to avoid the deep shudder each felt as joint saluted joint. Then Marcus entered his lovely woman.". They marry, have twins. The husband and a friend set up an optics lab in their back garden. They create glasses that make Lyle's vision normal. He's seduced by his 40 y,o. female biology ex-teacher. She sees she has disease. She dies. He decides to wear the glasses permnently.
It wasn't easy to guess where the plot was going until the glasses appeared. The passage I quote isn't the only one where there's an alien style. A rather strange story. - Flowers - On Valentine's Day Lois (a caterer) receives 3 anonymous bunches of flowers - one from her husband (a world class mathematician) one from herself (to provoke her husband) and one from a client.
- Conveniences - Amanda (20) lives with Ben (30), a lecturer. Frieda (15) lives upstairs and often pops in. He's writing an essay about Hawthorne. Amanda's writing an essay about the concept of marriage. She sees it as a convenience, love not necessary. He doesn't intend to stay with her. The couple split amicably at the end of summer, but devoted Frieda's sad.
- Hat Trick - It's the 1950s. 4 18 year-old girls are talking about their ideal men. The widowed mother of one of them says that men are samey. She gets the girls to pick names of local men/boys out of a hat that had belonged to her late husband. She claims that the girls could get the man they chose at random, and might as well. We find out what happened later to each girl, including the one who picked a blank piece of paper. The mother (who we meet on her deathbed in her 90s, widowed again) wasn't far wrong.
- Sonny - Dr Margolis is recovering from a serious illness. He's given a book of Jewish legends, and one of visual illusions - Dali, Arciboldo, etc. He has daughters of 12, 14, and 16 who (thanks to their mother) know about social rankings. Louis (low ranking) has a fruit and veg van (with carefully sorted (ranked) produce - hints of Archiboldo), and a son who goes to school with one of the girls. As the doctor recovers, the son dies. At his funeral the girls' mother "prayed for them. She asked not for lives free of sorrow - what deity would heed that request? No; she made a sensible plea: she prayed that all three would turn out to be barren". This story's better than the previous few.
- The Descent of Happiness - Only 5 pages! A girl recalls going with her doctor father on house calls 70 years ago." She fell running from a patient's dog, who she knew. She had run away because she wanted to be caught - not by the dog but by the father who would always rescue her. The ending is - I will never forget that day. I had never been so happy before. I have never been so happy since".
- Honeydew - Alice, 43, head of a respected private school for girls, is having an affair with Richard (anatomy prof), the father of an anorexic pupil Emily. Emily studies insects - she eats insect excreta ("honeydew") and is impressed that ants have 2 stomachs, one of them containing food for poor colleagues. "She had become a master of the ant heart - like the heart of all insects it was a primitive tube - and now turned her attention to the complicated stomach". A girl later says "So we evolved, and lost our second stomach. We get ourselves brains instead". Alice sees Emily watching her father leave Alice's room. Alice decides to marry the school gardener/carpenter.
Rather too many stories seem lightweight to me. The plots are hard to predict though, and there are interesting (sometimes incidental) details. For example, when a schoolgirl does a presentation, she points with her father's hiking stick.
Other reviews
- James Lasdun (Written in a brisk but highly coloured prose that swells into hyperbolic lushness whenever the opportunity arises ... There seems to me something fatally underchallenged about its convictions; a missing layer of doubt. Illumination, such as it is, comes in the form of emphasis and assertion rather than insight or analysis.... On the subject of love, we get the following, in which the couple looking at the anatomical illustration of the human knee turn their attention to the human heart: "A lumpy device with chambers and ventricles and arteries and atriums – atria – looking nothing at all like a valentine. Yet in one of those ventricles love got born, and then leaped to somebody else’s ventricle, from one heart to another, that’s how it was … The anatomy book did not identify which chamber was the seat of love, but the anatomy book was shy …". What you make of the story – what you make of the book as a whole, I suspect – will depend on whether you consider those words to be profoundly wise, or find instead that, despite the chambers and ventricles, despite the careful quibble over Latin plurals, despite the dismissal of valentines, you have just received a massive and brazen insult to your intelligence. ... She is more of a fabulist than a realist, stocking her tales with totemic objects and mythic archetypes ... Likewise with the characters’ inner lives – the writing isn’t subtle enough to capture much in the way of real emotion, substituting physical disorders for psychological conflict, and sugary artifice for real human feeling: “The space between the two women seemed to have been sprayed with attar of sentiment.” ... Without the drag of observed reality the stories float weightlessly into the state of cloying sweetness that seems to be their preferred atmosphere. Bad things happen, but they never seem fully believed in, and so the happiness bestowed on the characters who survive them feels unearned, kitschy.)
- TimeOut (Generally, her characters are well-off and clever. They take cruises and are knowledgeable about antiques and ancient poetry. ... With all these heart-tugging human experiences, it’s surprising that Pearlman’s stories aren’t more empathetic. But it’s inquisitiveness, not the need to relate, that drives her narratives ... At her best, Pearlman invigorates our curiosity about others, encouraging us to flip page after page just to see what a character ate for lunch. At her worst (which is still quite good), her stories feel a little too comfortable, and I wonder how much more she could do if she experimented.)
- James Wood (Many of Edith Pearlman’s short stories involve characters who are listening to others or spying on them ... Form, as so often in Pearlman’s stories, asserts itself as death: the moment when a life becomes fatally comprehensible. ... Pearlman’s fiction brings together, with uncanny wisdom, short views and long views: the hours of our lives and the length of our lives. She is tender and distant at once. The frequent result is a distinctive wittiness, a lightness and swiftness of tone familiar to readers of Muriel Spark ... Perhaps Pearlman is best seen as a fabulist in realist’s clothing: she densely describes her fictional worlds, yet briskly drives her short tales toward finality ... The relationship between fabulism and realism is difficult to manage, and occasionally Pearlman’s forms seem too narrow for the material; stories are resolved too hastily; the choreography is a little arch. ... Pearlman’s dearest subject may indeed be adequate happiness. She is interested in sustainable marriages, feasible relationships, functional contentment: whatever will last a lifetime.)
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