Presents a debut collection of short stories capturing the dark side of rural and urban life and linked by the theme of sex as a driving impulse. A first collection.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
This "short story" collection is unusually varied and is, at times, an almost experimental sequence of fiction. It includes extremely short pieces, some of them scarcely stories, more snaps of prose or poetry. The pieces alternate in setting between New York City and a small farm town in Missouri, with the former being spare avant-garde writings that dwell on neurotic and affectless love affairs, and the latter much broader and more open stories full of vivid characters. Even in Missouri the love and sex tend to be destructive, but the results are often funny.
From Publishers Weekly
Two very different landscapes, rural Missouri and urban New York City, inform 21 tales told by two searingly realistic, male first-person voices that expose a hard, unforgiving core at the center of relationships and sexual experiences. In the rural setting, the young narrator embarks on low-life adventures like those recalled in "Baker," in which he gets drunk on whiskey, hangs out with a 62-year-old man who knows every whore in town and ends up meeting two of them. What is poignant is how, as the narrator explains his dubious encounters, he is at once naive and possessed of enough self-awareness to convey his sense of exhilaration-and of dissociation and loss. This kind of heightened emotional paradox is even more pronounced in those stories set in New York City. The speaker of "In the Bathroom at Joey's Restaurant" describes his longtime, tumultuous relationship with Veronica-who breaks up with him constantly, only to want him back-as she is, once again, trying to reunite with him. Howell's stripped-bare, kinetic voice captures both the speaker's love for Veronica and his desire to get away from the psychodrama that being with her entails. A sly, bittersweet humor runs as an undercurrent throughout, as in the surreal "Willie and Jackie," an ill-fated love story about a wildebeest and a jellyfish. Overall, Howell's bracing prose and honesty about the dark side of love renders this collection sad, funny and devastatingly articulate.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining, experimental, erotic, funny, good.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Sexual Life of Savages and Other Stories (Hardcover)
The stories in this collection are a mix -- rural America, hip New York city. Some are better than others, but all have a...attitude and style that is great. Well worth buying
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