Review
In her fifth collection of stories, Shelnutt weaves a corporeal silence into words, fabric poetic in its elegance but nevertheless tethered to ideas--to the "conundrum of time" and of loss--that force the reader to ask questions of what in everyday life remains unspoken. Shelnutt masters strangeness into consciousness; plot issues secondarily, as a matter of shocking but excessively quiet happenstance: in one story, a boy is sent away to live with aunts, carrying flowers and a note in his pocket, his mother thinking that "all words were prophecy, announcements that kept fate tamed." In another, two women depart for Nova Scotia under a sky filled with black birds, and confront sensuality and difference in events bred by landscape. But it is Shelnutt's language that most rewards the reader. For in a defiance against both minimalism and sentimentality, she adheres to form, addressing incalculable underlying experience, "absorbing the paradox" of both poised distress and fated contingency.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
