Loving Wanda Beaver [Hardcover]

Alison Baker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1995

In a world that has quietly and unexpectedly gone tilt, the delightful, engaging characters in these stories and novella find their own way to regain equilibrium. A processing clerk at the Institute for the Study of American Sexual Appetite, Library of Desire section, longs for the attentions of a summer corn detasseler in "Loving Wanda Beaver, " the irresistible and unpredictable title story that has also been selected for Prize Stories 1995: The O. Henry Awards. In the novella "Almost Home, " Decker and his dog have fled the city for a rural life that is everything but tranquil as he encounters some very strange neighbors, a forest fire, a runaway bear, and other seemingly inexplicable acts of violence and acceptance.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Alison Baker, author of the collection of short stories How I Came West, and Why I Stayed, returns with a new collection of highly acclaimed stories and a novella. Baker writes some of the most quirky and hilarious prose we've read, with delightful characters trying to find some equilibrium in a world gone tilt.

From Publishers Weekly

In her second collection of short fiction, Baker (How I Came West, and Why I Stayed) crafts peculiar, improbably winsome tales?six stories and one novella?about disorderly lives. Although she never presumes to resolve her principals' futures, the author is an optimist; her stories generally end when a character finds peace. As in real life, true epiphanies are rare. Yet the remarkable title story features a transcendent resolution romantic enough to merit a sigh: Oleander Joy spends her summers detasseling corn and imagining a cozy domestic life with her crew boss, Wanda Beaver, but she can't gather the courage to approach her. During the off-season, Oleander dreams of her crush and works at the improbably named "Institute for the Study of American Sexual Appetite," where she embodies the commonplace human desire?and dread?of attaining a longtime wish. Baker's other tales aren't quite as unusual as the title story, but most share its climate of fearful expectancy. "Ooh, Baby, Baby" and the novella, "Almost Home," concern divorced men whose animal companions are far more reliable than humans; "The Third Person" introduces a middle-aged lesbian couple, one of whom is trying to downplay her terror of her inoperable cancer; "Convocation" describes a doting mother's sweet but frustrated attempts to console her manic-depressive daughter. Such cheerless scenarios, however, belie Baker's sensitive, bittersweet humor, and the roundabout way that her characters come to accept life's setbacks.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 213 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; 1ST edition (September 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081181064X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811810647
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,035,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars WONDERFUL WRITING, April 17, 2009

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T. Bellows "soul9" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loving Wanda Beaver: Novella and Stories (Paperback)

My biased view: Baker touches into a kind of sincerity - often - after the problems work out. She writes with a lightness. A sense of charmed absurdity. As if all the characters were a bit nutty - but it's not that darkly serious. * * * Get hold of HOW I CAME WEST AND WHY I STAYED as well.

4.0 out of 5 stars Homesick Grizzly Bear, August 1, 2005

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D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Loving Wanda Beaver (Hardcover)

The title story was the one most distinctively Alison Baker. Her special talent is to highlight the absurdities of everyday life and the eccentricities of ordinary people without overstepping into Donald Barthelme fantasy. Hers is the craziness of the mundane and the comedy of the tragic. Her only other book is "How I Came West and Why I Stayed" and there's been nothing I know of from her in the last nine years, unless she's the same Alison Baker who wrote "The Impact of Filtration Techniques on Chlorophyll Determinations" (which does sound possible now I think of it ).
I got least out of "Almost Home" but that may be because I always find the novella an irritating length. Also the impact of Alison Baker's wonderful opening sentences gets lost when a story is too long.
It's 80 pages about a guy whose son has been killed and who has left his wife to live in the woods and commune with something or other. He does encounter a number of Alison Baker type people and animals (a homesick grizzly bear, an intrusive rooster, a bad cat, an elusive cougar, a runaway dog) but I thought the hand of Raymond Carver was heavy and there was too much fine writing like "soggy seedheads of last summer's fireweed and thistle" that uses botanical erudition to give a spurious air of exactitude.(Can you see that seedheads are soggy though a pair of binoculars?)