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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great stories that are painfully precise, July 20, 2001
These edgy stories deserve all of the editorial praise they have earned. Simpson's protagonists are smart married London women-with-children in their thirties. Several are well-paid professionals working in corporate worlds, and the rest used to, but are now home with young children. (Their good-looking husbands are not much part of the action of these stories.) These competent women are by turns cynical ("Stress! She could handle it. She positively enjoyed jumping in its salty waves." - from "Burns and the Bankers") and full of yearning - for connection, for sex, love, enough hours in the day, and - to their husbands' consistent dismay: even another baby. Simpson's protagonists are most often outwardly composed and howlingly distressed. A day starts out like any other and quietly appalling (and wholly believable) events take place. The action is described acidly, accurately, and sometimes from several points of view. Simpson's ability to turn a phrase wowed me, along with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. She can by turns describe a shopping trip, an evening at the opera, sexual disappointment, the inner life of a teenage girl, the weather, office politics, men in kilts, or intense emotional states in ways that left me breathless. This is a terrifically satisfying read.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
england's finest, May 13, 2004
This review is from: Getting a Life: Stories (Paperback)
I brought the paperback of this book back from the UK and finally got around to reading it last month. It is simply one of the best-- funniest, best written, most trenchant, most important, most affecting-- story collections published in the last decade. Pretty much every story in it is about a thirtysomething woman with children; some of the women stay at home and have minds of mush, some of them have full-time jobs and are running high levels of frustration, guilt, or rationalization; all of them are an amazing and distinctive combination of real and repellent and attractive and flawed and sympathetic. Simpson's the real thing. I'm buying all her other books now. This one was published in the US but with its outstanding UK title rendered, dreadfully, as "Getting a Life." What were the US publishers thinking?
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Especially for Toddlerians, July 29, 2002
This review is from: Getting a Life: Stories (Paperback)
Getting a Life by Helene Simpson is a less-than-luminously-literary-but-entertaining-anyway collection of short stories. Most of the stories are centered around domestic life, meaning: there are a lot of stay-at-home-moms and struggling working moms in these stories, agonizing over their lost identities. I have to say that I strongly identified with this theme, and so may be rating this collection a little higher than someone else would, but Simpson really nails the mom thing. I found myself reading large sections out loud to my partner as my toddler pulled out all the toys I'd just put away. In "Cafe Society" two mothers meet for conversation and a little intellectual stimulation. They are aware, writes Simpson, "that the odds against this happening are about fifty to one." Still, they persevere, and most of their conversation happens mentally as they wrangle the toddler. A couple of the women in the stories reappear in other stories, and I found myself hoping that Simpson would stick with just those women and wishing she'd written a novel about them. Some of the stories, written around some themes having to do with the end of the millenium, seem a little dated. "Millenium Blues" is such a story, and probably should not have been included in this collection, both because the fears expressed already seem quaint and because the ending is absurd. Absurdity doesn't fit well with the rest of the collection, which is generally a diary of domestic life in its small details and despairs. All in all, a light read, but a definite "don't skip" if you are a toddlerian (ie, you happen to have small children at home).
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