From Publishers Weekly
Prose ( Primitive People ; Household Saints ) is a highly talented writer who in this collection of stories--most of them previously published in little magazines--seems to be seeking a subject. They are mostly about young, fairly sophisticated people in a vaguely artistic milieu who are profoundly at odds with each other and their world. Prose has a marvelous ear for the inanities of contemporary dialogue, and is continuously observant; there is never a time when she bores the reader or causes impatience, and she is often very funny. But readers will likely come away with little more than cool admiration for her intelligence and her rueful insights. In "Amazing," for instance, a young puppeteer does his work at a party in the house of a wealthy and clearly dysfunctional family, only to be drawn into an odd and not very convincing encounter with the father of the household; in "Potato World," a bright, disaffected girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress is chased there by her hapless boyfriend, with disastrous results; "Rubber Life" is a sort of ghost story about a librarian and her best customer that ends, as so many of these stories do, with a symbolist flourish that is effective in itself but seems unrelated to what has gone before. Read one at a time these stories would probably seem more hip and entertaining than they do as a collection, where their similarities and frequent glibness are more apparent.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
More entertaining, offbeat fiction from a proven master of domestic whimsy--author of eight novels and one other story collection (Women and Children First, 1988). Like a promising jazz invention, this 11-tale collection starts loose and cool with ``Talking Dog,'' in which a young woman tells how her dramatic older sister wielded undeserved emotional power over others, even after her death; then warms up with ``Cauliflower Heads,'' whose heroine, an American newlywed in Italy, acknowledges that her marriage to a radioactive-waste- disposal expert is a serious mistake; and hits its stride with ``Rubber Life,'' in which a library employee's obsession with a local artist turns to unexpected relief and laughter when a ghost- child ends the affair. As each of the remaining eight stories follows, Prose's intimate, confiding, subtly urgent narrative voice invites the reader ever deeper into the land of children's birthday parties, art museums, shopping malls, and outdoor weddings where her suburban-loner characters' sudden, quirky epiphanies take place. One of the best and most tightly honed tales is ``Amateur Voodoo,'' in which a son's search for his lost cat brings his parents together with his father's former lover for an uneasy cup of tea; in ``Potato World,'' even a teenager's phenomenally botched summer romance turns out to matter less than expected in the universal scheme of things; and in the final tale, ``Hansel and Gretel,'' Prose's delight in exposing the deadly sins that lurk beneath the surface of suburban ennui reaches its memorable peak. Prose--a master at maintaining a sense of the homogenized texture of American life while celebrating each individual's peculiar experience within it--works these tales of infidelity, envy, fear, and garden-variety confusion into a bright and memorable melody. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
