Amazon.com Review
Alice Elliott Dark's second collection of stories evokes the same reaction one might have to a terribly beautiful, unabashedly smart woman--the reader is left both captivated and unnerved. Dark, of course, has a great many expectations to live up to. There's not only the success of her debut collection,
Naked to the Waist, but the numerous bouquets tossed at the title story of
In the Gloaming: first John Updike chose it for inclusion in
The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and then it was made into a fine (and highly visible) film. Yet she meets the challenge with wide range and descriptive acuity--and, better, with an emotional intensity that unifies the entire collection. Her stories largely concern what is said, and what is unsaid, between lovers, neighbors, and family members. "In the Gloaming," for example, revolves around the valedictory conversations of a mother and her son who is dying of AIDS. In "The Secret Spot," a young wife encounters a woman whom she mistakenly identifies as a rival for her husband's affections, and chats herself into an awful, artful epiphany. The protagonist of "Dreadful Language" is haunted by her dead lover, who seems to pass judgment on the suburban existence she has settled for:
He came to me more and more often and was so himself, so surprising and other, that I had to reason with myself severely on my train rides back to Wynnemoor to remember that I was making him up. Or was I? Has anyone ever known for sure the provenance of either art or apparitions?
At times Dark demonstrates an almost Victorian impulse toward melodrama--
almost because she grounds her coincidences in the ordinary mess of modern life. And her mastery of atmosphere will persuade us of almost anything. Witness the spooky and authoritative opening of "Maniacs": "Silent sound, vivid absence, pressure from beyond the quilts and walls, the taste of pennies on the tongue; several miles apart two sisters awoke within moments of each other and instinctively knew it had snowed." Whether you're seeking exquisite prose or raw emotion, you'll find yourself perfectly moved and plainly edified by Dark's capacious talent.
--Amy Grace Loyd
From Publishers Weekly
The title story of Dark's second collection was a major 1994 hit, published in Best American Short Stories of the Century and made into a critically acclaimed HBO film starring Glenn Close, directed by Christopher Reeve. The other nine stories collected here prove that Dark is by no means a one-hit-wonder. Probing the murkiest and the more illuminated regions of the human psyche, these tales reckon with relationships between lovers, spouses, sisters, neighbors and parents and children with a masterful combination of subtle humor, emotional precision and devastating narrative tension. The collection opens with the celebrated title story about a woman tending to her adult son who's dying of AIDS; the tone throughout is one of sorrowful, unnerving quiet until the final, cathartic line. "The Tower" is a spirited tale of a suave, detached bachelor who, upon finally meeting his soul mate, falls madly in love, setting up a chain of coincidences that leads the new couple to a hilarious, unexpected plateau. Similarly twisted humor abounds in "The Secret Spot," which suspensefully skewers a vengeful woman who obsessively plans a long-awaited confrontation with her husband's mistress. Other stories perceptively plumb the relationships between sisters, with "The Jungle Lodge" following two teen sisters on a jaunt in Peru that turns nightmarish, and "Maniacs" showing the despair and longing in a mother taking her two pubescent daughters to the airport so they can fly alone to visit their divorced father. The author manifests the voices of men and women, teens and seniors, with equal dexterity, and whether it's an elderly woman facing the frightening immediacy of relocating to a rest home, a man trying to choose between his wife and his lover, or a dying celebrity desperate for a favor from the home-town neighbors she's always scorned, Dark's characters ring fearlessly, plangently true. Dark (Naked to the Waist) belongs in the annals with literary peers Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro, and with this collection she should garner widespread acclaim and attention. Agent, Henry Dunow. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
