From Publishers Weekly
In a steady stream of movies (
Friends and Neighbors, etc.) and plays
(The Mercy Seat, etc.), LaBute has honed his singular ability to depict self-interested, acid-tongued and deeply flawed characters. In this debut collection, he applies his fierce, disturbing energy to 20 short stories. Not surprisingly, echoes of his screen and stage characters populate these pages—men and women engaging in adulterous affairs, voyeuristic fantasies, doomed interactions. The playwright's rapid-fire dialogue vividly captures provocative moments of conflict in some stories; others employ first-person, free-associative monologues ("She's been going at it, this talking stuff, I mean, for around three hours straight, seriously, without a pause, and it's really getting me down. I almost feel sad inside, or lonely...."). LaBute is a master at crafting shocking situations and nasty characters, but this ungenerous view of the human heart can make for a dark and brutal read. In "Ravishing," the narrator describes an encounter with a prostitute that ends with the making of a snuff film. In "Maraschino," a woman knowingly—but incomprehensibly—seduces her drunk ex-stepfather. Sharp dialogue and grim imagination aside, LaBute's microfictions rarely delve below the surface to offer insight into the nature of the human condition; the collection as a whole feels a little sadistic, the act of reading it a kind of complicated masochism.
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LaBute has a knack for exposing the unseemly side of human nature. In this debut story collection, named after an Elvis Costello song, the controversial writer-director, whose credits include films (
In the Company of Men and
Your Friends and Neighbors) and plays (
The Mercy Seat and
The Shape of Things), presents men and women engaged in precarious trysts of fate. From a family man's seemingly innocuous flirtation in an airport cafeteria to a sex-obsessed actor who gets snubbed by a wannabe star, LaBute's brief, biting stories reveal a bounty of dubious behaviors motivated largely by lust. In the title story, an adulterous wife is wracked with guilt at the sight of her cereal-slurping spouse. In "Full Service," a female mechanic plays mind games with an overly confident customer, and in "Perfect," a husband goes ballistic over a growth on his wife's flesh. Traveling the same rocky emotional terrain as the late short-story master Andre Dubus, Labute's smart, edgy offering delivers pleasures well beyond the time frame his title suggests.
Allison BlockCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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