Customer Reviews

Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In his unsparing revelations of family dynamics, Bausch gets under the skin of marriage as no other author I know of. He is the only writer who can make me squirm with discomfort at the same time he keeps me riveted to the page. In book after book he writes with incredible clarity, precision, and humor; SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME is no exception. Just when you think you're ready to put the book down, you are compelled to go on to the next story. And the next. Who can read about the murderous protagonist of "Valor" without feeling compassion? And who can fail to be amused by the Myrna Loy/William Powell antics of the parents in "Glass Meadow" while at the same time sympathizing with their sons? Not to laugh out loud at the observations of the young wife in the title story would be as heartless as not feeling her pain. And to resist Richard Bausch is to resist the greatest practitioner of the short story in America today.

Seems an oxymoron, but anyone who's read other books by Bausch knows it isn't. Bausch portrays deeply painful situations with humor and a sense of abiding compassion for his characters. You will put this book down in pain, both in empathy for its characters and in sorrow that it's over. A wonderful read.

Richard Bausch in these stories--of an older men with younger women, of a woman recovering from a dysfunctional relationship who hooks up with a horrible golfer who persuades himself he is good, of a man with low self-esteem who stumbles out of a bar drunk one morning to save a busload of children, of a man who wins the lottery only to face the final anomie of life as loss--takes somewhat downtrodden and mundane middle-to-lower class characters and reveals them in their secret glory. He has a way of fully seizing an everyday situation and revealing to us its depths, sometimes switching character point of view within the same story. The stories have the opposite effect of Chinese food according to the culinary cliche: they may seem on the light side while being mentally digested, but in retrospect they confer literary nutrition--staying, like the best fiction, with you long after the book is closed; these then are stories whose characters, if not the most memorable, are so real, so deeply sliced from the pie of modern American life, that their quandries and partial resolutions, their fictional or fictionalized lives, tend to merge with one's own memories.

Bausch's stories provide the certainty that you can eavesdrop on any life and find something worth hearing. The stories may not cheer you up, but they'll make you glad you read them.

I first heard of Richard Bausch when he praised some work of Janis Ian's. I went to see what kind of writer he was, and was pleasantly informed. He really develops his characters. They are real to the reader, and you can be sympathetic toward them even as they bumble and stumble through life ... just like we all do. Not alot of fun & happy endings here, but the stories will touch your heart in a good way.

Bausch is one of my favorite writers, and this is certainly one of his better books. The stories are so engrossing, so captivating--it is one of the neatest books I've bought for full price/hardcover in a long time. I will definitely buy his next! Recommended for all who enjoy a good story. (Each story makes an excellent "one-sitting" piece, they don't have to be read together and in fact are better NOT read together).

The high points in this book of stories were attained with some perceptive insights about human relations and the human condition. However, they were not sufficient to overcome an average book.