Eleven stories take their characters from the numbness of routine to the shock of the unexpected, from a saleswoman who finds herself in the middle of a holdup to a jogger whose past comes back to haunt him.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
This first collection of short stories by Pamela Gullard focuses on normal, everyday men and women whose lives have run aground or been torn asunder by some event above and beyond their control. In one story, an angry teenager loses control and rips his mother's rose bushes out of the ground, tearing his own hands to shreds in the process. In another, a physician's sense of order crumbles following the sudden death of her husband; suddenly the objects around her seem to levitate, as if the whole world had somehow slipped its moorings. The characters in this book share an uncanny ability for the unconscious gesture that brings meaning to the seeming chaos that has been visited upon their lives.
From Publishers Weekly
Common throughout this fine first collection of 11 stories?besides their settings in the Northwest?are characters who are unsettled with their place in the contemporary world. Gullard's skill is in placing their sense of transience, suspension and isolation in the foreground. In "Jump Jack," a solitary middle-aged floral delivery man leads a regimented life so that he will never again be homeless, as he was just three years earlier. When his long-lost son, Greg, deposits Jack's five-year-old grandson, Eli, into his care, it soon becomes clear that Greg is not planning to return. Jack, abused by his father as a child, struggles to avoid reenacting that behavior with the spirited Eli; his reward is earning the child's trust, and the final line, "He was safe," poignantly applies to both Eli and Jack. "Does Your Tattoo Show?" is a clever story about a pair of casual lovers, Marta and Derrin, on vacation in Puerto Rico. Marta's impulsive decision to get a tattoo?the ultimate mark of permanence?seems to inspire her decision that her halfhearted affair with Derrin is no longer enough for her. But when Derrin reveals that he is, in fact, in love with her and proposes marriage, Marta understands for the first time what she truly desires. Finally, the title story explores the love and marriage of Stewart, a subcontractor, and Helen, who move from Seattle to the mountains to raise their infant son. The story gracefully reveals Stewart's initial disappointment with their new life, and then his realization of the many surprises and possibilities in store for him. Gullard's staccato prose sometimes feels disjointed, but it provides the space in which her well-drawn characters can breathe.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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