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Short stories erotically charged
By Francine du Plessix Gray |
February 21, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THEY travel to St Kitts for winter breaks and to Florence for their 20th wedding anniversaries. They play CDs of Joan Sutherland in their cars. When crises arise they take to bourbon and snack on olive tapenade.
Rome's air pollution is a likely subject of conversation over their dinners, which might feature gnocchi in basil cream sauce and radicchio and orange salad, washed down with a St Amour Beaujolais. They read The Economist and go to psychiatrists who subscribe to Paris-Match. Readily dropping foreign phrases, they flatter a woman by saying that she looks like a Balthus or that she has a lot of chien.
Which is to say that most of the characters in Amy Bloom's fiction are exceedingly cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. In her latest, erotically charged, highly explicit collection of short stories, "Where the God of Love Hangs Out," they also think and speak in a cheeky if not impudent manner. "You come to my house and I'll shoot you myself," a daughter says to her difficult mother. An aging man, recalling the loves of his early youth, describes one as "a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams," another as "an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sport coat."
This upbeat sassiness of tone is one of the many treasures of Bloom's new collection, which differs markedly from her previous ones. It includes two sets of linked narratives, each consisting of four stories, as well as several free-standing yarns.
The central figures in the first quartet are William and Clare, both professors, who have become lovers. The book's second quartet features Lionel Sampson, an African-American lawyer whose father, also named Lionel, was a famous jazz musician, and his white stepmother, Julia.
This divorce-driven accumulation of wives past and present, of children from several broods, creates some confusion for the reader. Writing a good story, after all, is not unlike holding a good dinner party. The fare should be succulent, but the seating should be planned with equal care: diners should be properly introduced, and delicate attention should be given to the way they might relate to one another.
But Bloom vividly chronicles the lives of people caught in emotional and physical constraints -- illnesses they strive to survive, regrets they try to allay, desires they often dare not fulfill. She writes in beautifully wrought prose, with spunky humor and a flair for delectably eccentric details.
Rome's air pollution is a likely subject of conversation over their dinners, which might feature gnocchi in basil cream sauce and radicchio and orange salad, washed down with a St Amour Beaujolais. They read The Economist and go to psychiatrists who subscribe to Paris-Match. Readily dropping foreign phrases, they flatter a woman by saying that she looks like a Balthus or that she has a lot of chien.
Which is to say that most of the characters in Amy Bloom's fiction are exceedingly cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. In her latest, erotically charged, highly explicit collection of short stories, "Where the God of Love Hangs Out," they also think and speak in a cheeky if not impudent manner. "You come to my house and I'll shoot you myself," a daughter says to her difficult mother. An aging man, recalling the loves of his early youth, describes one as "a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams," another as "an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sport coat."
This upbeat sassiness of tone is one of the many treasures of Bloom's new collection, which differs markedly from her previous ones. It includes two sets of linked narratives, each consisting of four stories, as well as several free-standing yarns.
The central figures in the first quartet are William and Clare, both professors, who have become lovers. The book's second quartet features Lionel Sampson, an African-American lawyer whose father, also named Lionel, was a famous jazz musician, and his white stepmother, Julia.
This divorce-driven accumulation of wives past and present, of children from several broods, creates some confusion for the reader. Writing a good story, after all, is not unlike holding a good dinner party. The fare should be succulent, but the seating should be planned with equal care: diners should be properly introduced, and delicate attention should be given to the way they might relate to one another.
But Bloom vividly chronicles the lives of people caught in emotional and physical constraints -- illnesses they strive to survive, regrets they try to allay, desires they often dare not fulfill. She writes in beautifully wrought prose, with spunky humor and a flair for delectably eccentric details.
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