A brilliant collection of stories, which illuminate with unflinching vision and hard-earned compassion a great variety of lives. In 'Star Baby' a gay man leaves the big city for life in his hometown, only to find himself cast as a father figure to his detoxing sister's young son ('Mostly he avoids taking Deke to restaurants, not because of the catamite issue but because the two of them look so alone in the world.'); In 'The Crazy Thought' a woman chafes at life after the departure of the husband she never imagined leaving her ("Nothing wrong with John Le Carre," Paul said. 'I'd hell of a lot sooner read him than fucking John Updike. If we're talking about Johns here."); and in the title story an embittered dean loses his wife, child, and student lover ('I took out The Portable Blake. Holding it up to read meant exposing my fraying cuffs. But I'd be straphanging any minute now, so what the fuck. And what the fuck anyway.').
I’m not even sure why I disliked this, except it tapped into what I like to call the Mad Men paradox: intellectually excellent, but no joy, no bristling dark energy to capture the imagination.
(Also, for what it’s worth, I first read the story “The Bad Thing” in Jeffrey Eugenide’s collection My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, and it stood out as one of the better. I had this book on my shelf before I read that one, but didn’t realize until reading it now that it opened with that same story. Again, it was one of the better ones. So… yeah.)
Reading updates
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19 August, 2010:
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19 August, 2010:
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