Hydroplane: Fictions [Paperback]

Susan Steinberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 2006

Hydroplane is a story collection filled with the urgency of erotic obsession. Its breathless voices, palpable in their desire, are propelled by monomania, rushing from one preoccupation into another: a garage, a painting class, a basketball game, boys. Their words take on kinetic force, an almost headlong momentum, as though, while reading, one were picking up speed, veering out of control. The past returns. Rumination are continuous. A stranger at a bus stop is indistinguishable from the narrator's deceased grandfather; party guests turn ghoulish, festivities merge with nightmares.

Each of Steinberg's stories builds as if telegraphed. Each sentence glissades into the next as though in perpetual motion, as characters, crippled by loss, rummage through their recollections looking for buffers to an indistinct future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The dozen moody stories of Steinberg's second collection (after The End of Free Love) buzz with a tangible erotic tension, sometimes laced with loneliness, sometimes urgent with desire. In the title tale, high school memories of bad-girl behavior color the narrator's fraught encounter with a man who stops to change her flat tire on a lonely, rain-slicked highway. The same slippery overlap of present and past energizes the spooky "The Last Guest," in which the narrator's meeting with an aloof red-haired man, the last to arrive at a house party, triggers memories of the seventh grade: both the physical charge of dry-humping with a "boy-looking girl" and the perversity with which the two friends stalked a redheaded boy—now grown into the mysterious man. Snapshots of a beach vacation form "Static," about a teenage girl who tests the power of her newfound sexuality ("always a cocktease, always wriggling") while she observes her father with his girlfriends, "every summer a new bleach-blonde with toothpick legs." Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Steinberg proved that she can play with form in her debut, The End of Free Love (2003), and she continues to scratch sparks against the predictable in her second collection, which is reminiscent of works by Mary Robison and Amy Hempel. A thick cloud of mania and obsession hangs over these erotically charged, lightly plotted stories. In "Lifelike," a young art student suffers panic attacks while being stifled by her diamond-encrusted mother; in another, a pair of siblings discover their father hanging from the rafters of the family garage. To recount the stark details of this collection, though, is to miss the rhapsody of the prose, for these stories read more like poems, and Steinberg uses repetition--of words, sentence sequences, images, and circular meanings--to evoke the mind's inner clockwork. Every reader has lived a Steinberg story, everyone has been lonely, or chronically fixated on something just out of reach. Steinberg walks a delicate line here between real life and hidden association, sentiment and reality, and she does so with ease. Emily Cook
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 205 pages
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2; 1 edition (April 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573661295
• ISBN-13: 978-1573661294
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #604,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern fiction's secret elixir, November 4, 2006

By 

Alan Rifkin - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hydroplane: Fictions (Paperback)

Steinberg may be the most organic voice in modern lit. I can sip from any paragraph of any page of her previous collection, "The End of Free Love," and remember why writing matters. (I'm pretty helpless to resist a narrator who announces, in the middle of one new story, "I lied to you." That pretty much wakes me up as a reader.)

Her best stories are like accident scenes. She'll circle around some adolescent horror, and sift through its broken shards, knowing the truth will come in focus soon enough, and that it will be fatally beautiful. I think she may have discovered the precise way the mind heals itself, if the mind happens to be literary. At the end of one of these new stories, about a suicide, she manages to blur past and present, analogy and reality into a devastating substitutionary climax--in this case so completely demolishing the wall between right and left brains that I experienced a losing child's game of basketball as though it were the actual death.

Sometimes Steinberg tries to reenact, fetishistically, some erotic conflict from the narrator's past; other times, a la Steve Erickson and Jorge Luis Borges, time's logic just crumbles before the higher logic of fever, coincidence, and the unconscious. She's writing about time's irrevocability, but whereas most storytellers' instinct is to stay with the action, hers is to stop time and slice up its latencies.

Here is a not-untypical Steinberg first line from "Invitation,"

Doors locked, he says, and windows up, radio off to be safe, but why, just off, he says, and, wear my jacket, but why, just wear it, your dress is too thin, my dress is fine, your dress, it's fine.

I was going to summarize the plot and theme, but in that one sentence she's done it.

I did seem to detect,this time around, some editorial intrusion in the name of literalness and scene-setting. ("I was at school. We were critiquing. We stood to look at the paintings.") and I really resented it. That's not Steinberg--that's too conscious. Nevertheless, the book is brilliant: her work is art itself, a secret elixir that so many need today, and so few know about.