On announcing June Spence as the winner of the 1995 Willa Cather Fiction contest, Leonard Michaels wrote, these stories are not only rich in characters, events, and perceptions of the way we feel and think, they are also imaginatively written on every level, from the choice of particular words to the flow of sentences to the shape of whole stories. One sees great promise in this writer--and then one thinks no, it isn't promise--this writer has just plain entered the city. Missing Women and Others is the first collection of stories by a young Southern writer whose dazzling--and often startling--use of language gives vivid and surprising life to a world we may think we know from reading the tabloids and keeping our eyes on our neighbors. Her characters are ordinary individuals, mostly women, whose lives go unnoticed by the world around them; and yet their longings and their appetites are larger than their unremarkable presence. These are affecting tales of daughters, mothers, grandmothers; of wives, girlfriends, and lovers. Spence's stories capture the inner lives of misunderstood or marginalized characters--the parts of ourselves we keep hidden within us. It is a rare and impressive introduction of a distinctive new voice in fiction.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
June Spence's debut collection of stories, Missing Women and Others, follows men and women who bound their lives in reassuring routine. Measuring out small doses of wine or food or love, they're trying to get a grip or hold themselves together or fix themselves up, just a little, just enough to buy what this kind of currency can get them. They're not pathetic, but they're not exactly life's lottery winners, either: waitresses, typists, accountants, apartment managers--unremarkable people struggling to contain outsize longings inside circumscribed lives. The dieting heroine of "Meals and Between Meals," for instance, strikes up a hasty but sincere relationship with an inmate of Purdue County Correctional, reasoning that "she has always settled for what she could get in the way of a man and Mag is pretty much just that: what she could get." Nell of "State of Repair" finds meaning in a small attic fire--"the only really exciting and near-tragic thing that happened to her." There's not much happening in many of these stories; they are still shots of still lives. Nonetheless, Spence triumphs over the occasional inertia of her subject matter. Her prose is crisp and witty and full of ominous undertones--most especially in the title story, the collection's best and an auspicious sign of Spence's potential. The "Missing Women" are a mother, her daughter, and the daughter's friend who abruptly disappear one night in early summer. At first, the town pulls together in a search effort, until, as time passes, the women disappear from collective memory as well. Told in the third person plural, as if by the whole town itself, the story's tone veers from deftly satiric--"What's next for this wrongly accused fellow who has stolen all our hearts?"--to deeply spooky: "And what of the missing women? They do turn up, but only in dreams.... In the one we don't speak of, we are running down a familiar forest path, hunted, and we sense them beneath the pads of our feet, planted deep in the dark green woods, bones cooling, and we wake, knowing they've been here all along."
From Publishers Weekly
"I was the woods in that riddle where no felled tree would sound without a listener," says one of the many marginalized women in this strong debut short-story collection, and she could be speaking for all of them. Spence's characters are modern, American, idiomatic, young and uncomfortably contingent in the places they inhabit. Five times a night, the unnamed narrator of "Fight or Flight" gets up to test the door, and she and her jogging companion, Bernadette, play "who's the rapist"?to which Bernadette's ultimate answer is "they're all potentials." The title story is a masterful description of a mother, her teenage daughter and her daughter's friend who all vanish, three disappearing women at first obscured by conflicting stories from likely witnesses, by people who come forward with confessions or theories about alien intervention, by volunteer efforts, newspaper reports, the fading posters in store windows, the psychologists who advise moderate exercise and lots of rest to all who fear a similar fate. Eventually, the three women evanesce into myth. Spence, winner of the 1995 Willa Cather Award, surveys these limited lives with humor and an admirable absence of sentimentality. The women aren't always clear about what they want, but most know they wish to avoid emotional predators. Sometimes their radar fails to detect these energy vampires. Sometimes they fault their radar for having been too effective. Many, like the young Violet in the moving "Isabelle and Violet Are Friends," see their choices as a mutating series of compromises: Violet maintains a technical virginity in exchange for her father's membrane-thin control of his drinking. Spence has no illusions and writes intelligently about women in the process of relinquishing theirs.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I was there, in their heads.,
By mikeandlynns@dialpoint.net (Albemarle, NC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Missing Women and Others (Hardcover)
The women in this book are as good as real. I have loved them, helped them, pitied them, and have just been baffled by them. Wonderful people you will never know if you do not by the book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
VERY premature debut.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Missing Women and Others (Hardcover)
Spence has written one outstanding story (the title story) and has churned out many acceptable, workmanlike efforts as well; but this, unfortunately, does not make an interesting collection. The funny, juvenile Seventeen story ("Isabelle and Violet",) in particular, sat uncomfortably beside the more depressed, serious pieces about adults. It seems to have been crammed into the collection because it was published somewhere. Most of these stories I forgot after I read them; some I even forgot as I was reading them. Judging from the final story, Spence has got real talent, but even the brightest talent needs a decade or two to develop, and I hope she isn't in a rush to publish anytime soon.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Better Reading / Rating,
By "epistrophic" (Lancaster, PA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Missing women & others (Paperback)
Missing Women certainly deserves to be better read and "read better" than the reviewer from Portland allows or is able.Consequently, I'll offer 5-stars to compensate.A close read of these stories...separately and collectively...is well worth the time. I'd compare the tone... confident, observant writing matched with unvarnished insight...to that of Mary Robison (who should be in print)and the point of view...rigorous honesty and perspective...to Lisa Zeidner in Layover. The content and the mood of the stories is memorable in the way that observing life from a "writerly" perspective is memorable...there's drama/melodrama/tragedy/comedy (sometimes simultaneously) in the ordinary (such as one finds in Christopher Tilghman & Tim Gautreaux) as well as in the extravagant. The collection was aptly titled (MW and Others) and sequenced to offer the reader the reward of discrete readings of the stories, as well as the reward of experiencing their overall impact. High marks to June Spence. I eagerly anticipate future work.
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