From Publishers Weekly
In her first story collection poet and novelist Braverman ( Lithium for Medea ; Palm Latitudes ) creates a mosaic with an integral connectedness; the 12 stories form a complete set of variations on a theme. In lingering glimpses of these Los Angeles residents, Braverman portrays women whose desperation and romance with booze or cocaine feed on each other. In "Falling in October," Diana Barrington, who appears in several tales, muses, "We are falling in and out of love without warning. We are asking strangers to marry us. The rain is falling like green bullets. . . . We are falling to the ground, through the earth itself, into debt and disaster." Another heroine, whose husband keeps showing her mean little apartments in bad neighborhoods (harbingers of post-divorce life), travels with him to Hawaii for her 40th birthday. in "Points of Decision." There she imagines herself in another life, as a waitress: "She would look satisfactory in such an outfit, carrying a tray of drinks. Someone at the hotel would get drugs for her." Language--her own sensuous prose, and her characters' obsessions with words--the theme of communication-- plays a vital role in Braverman's books. She writes about choices, about what we choose to name or to characterize, about what we allow ourselves to know in words. Although the intense richness which saturates these stories is occasionally overwhelming, the collection is a bold and exotic feat.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The women of these 12 related stories are almost indistinguishable: emotionally fragile, addictive, divorced, exiled, and desperately turning 40. They inhabit a millennial Los Angeles that ranges from the swimming pools and gardens of Beverly Hills in the title story and "Over the Hill" to the anonymous apartments in "Naming Names" and "Temporary Light." They attend AA meetings, reminisce with friends, raise children alone, face biopsies and extinction, and attract men like the fast-talking drug dealer of "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta." To their stories Braverman brings an elegiac, autumnal vision touched by the absurd. Her most telling revelations occur "in these clairvoyant ruins where we live between improvisations, consecrating the moments with our prayers and lies." A powerful, moving collection that evokes the work of Joan Didion. The author has published Palm Lati tudes (LJ 6/1/88) and Lithium for Medea (1979), as well as poetry collections.
-Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
