Customer Reviews

The Half You Don't Know: Selected Stories

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Peter Cameron is a superb novelist. If you want proof, read "The Weekend" or his fantasia on love life in New York City called "Leap Year." The short stories collected in "The Half You Don't Know" are the first stories of his that I've read. And now I plan to buy his other two collections. What a wonderful writer. His characters are so full and rich, even when Cameron tells you very little about them. He is especially good with young people like the boy in 'Homework' whose dog, Keds, "got smashed by some kid pushing a shopping cart;" or Julie in 'Fear of Math' who begins a casual affair with her summer school calculus professor in order to pass the course; or Mark in 'What Do People Do All Day' who brags that his monogram is MTV, or Patrick in 'Fast Forward' who agrees to accompany his friend, Alison, to Maine where Patrick will pretend to be her fiance, so that, supposedly, Alison's mother can die happily.

Comparisons are odious, but I have not found so much delight in discovering a writer since I first read the stories and novels of David Leavitt. Cameron and Leavitt are not at all alike in their writing styles but they both do have such a warm, loving compassion for all of their characters, especially the ones who do not know how to solve their problems, but nevertheless, keep trying to find a way out.

I especially treasure a story called 'Slowly' in which a young widow and her late groom's brother try to move on with their lives, to comfort one another and to complete the grieving process.

Cameron always leaves the 'half you don't know' as a mystery. He refuses to fill in all the blanks with his characters. They are our relatives and friends. They are us. We laugh with them and when they are in trouble, as they often are, we empathize greatly with them. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The collection includes some of Cameron's finest short stories: "The Secret Dog," "Slowly," "Jump or Dive," and others. The collection also includes the short story he eventually turned into the novel "The Weekend."

Cameron has an eye for details, dialogue and simple and original descriptions that make you say, yeah, that's exactly how it is, how come I never thought of it that way before?

I did find, however, that the stories are best read during separate sittings. Otherwise, the similarity in tone and characterizations begins to wear a little bit thin; and the sweet, poignant, almost hapless characters start to seem kind of passive-aggressive.

My girlfriend at College used to have a big crush on Cameron back when he was wowing the campus with his poetry in the school literary magazine. I was jealous of him then. Now I'm just jealous of his ability to write such great short stories.

Although I prefer Peter Cameron's novels (Leap Year, The Weekend, Andorra, The City of Your Final Destination), he first made a name for himself in the mid-1980s with wistful short stories. All but two of the stories in this collection were in his first collection (One Way or Another). The additional stories focus on gay characters with a background of AIDS death and were first published in the_ Yale Review_. "Deparing" is the mbryo of his novel _The Weekend_ and one of three stories in the collection ("Homework" and "Excerpt from Swan Lake" are the other two) that were selected for O. Henry Awards.

Seven of the seventeen stories were first published in the _New Yorker_. Somewhat offbeat children and young adults of both sex experience the oddness of adults and the complicated relations among the adults they observe who are dying or have survived divorce, or are thinking about getting married. Not much happens and (as with many contemporary literary stories) the stories tend tostop rather than be wrapped up. Life and its uncertainties will go on for the somewhat perplexed, somewhat perplexing and never-fulfilled characters.

Almost every story has an observation or dialogue that makes me laugh out loud. My favorites are two stories about young New Yorkers visiting relatives in Maine with a possible marriage partner ("Fast Forward" and "Nuptials and Heathens," the latter with the best absurd line in the book) and one about a young woman who has to pass calculus to begin Columbia MBA program in the fall ("Fear of Math"), though I was not sorry to have read any of the fourteen stories.

By far, Peter Cameron is indeed one of the very few talented short story writers in America today. The stories in this volume are written with craft and skill that are quite rare to find nowadays. With regards to gay writing, Cameron is quite distinct as he deals with homosexuality in the most tactfull yet intelligent manner. He doesn't raise eye-brows when he introduces a gay character or a gay plot. It is just natural for him. Excellent!

Every now and then a line, a character, or a situation from this book will pop into my head, even though I read it over a decade ago. I won't bother to go into detail since I could never do justice to these stories by taking any parts out of context. Suffice to say that this collection is unique in it's ability to elicit laughter one moment, then fill the reader with melancholy and wistfulness the next. "Nuptials and Heathens" is the one I wish I had written, although almost all the tales in this collection are smart, insightful glimpses into human nature, and great additions to the field of contemporary short stories. C'mon, Mr. Cameron - write some more for us! (Okay, for me...).

Peter Cameron writes beautifully, and his characterisation is superb, astonishingly vivid for this promiscuous genre. Do yourself a favour and buy this collection.