The Stories of Alice Adams [Hardcover]

Alice Adams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 2002

Twenty-five of her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker within a ten-year period. Others were published in The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and McCall's. Her work was included in twenty-three O. Henry Award collections, and she received first prize six times; she was represented in numerous collections of Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories.

Now the best of Alice Adams's short fiction is gathered in one volume-fifty-three stories that illumine the hidden workings of human relationships. In "Verlie I Say Unto You," the unexpected death of Verlie Jones's lover reveals the unsettling truth about her employers-that, though they "couldn't get along without" Verlie, their maid of ten years, she is nothing more than a stranger to them. In "Berkeley House," a disenfranchised daughter anguished over the sale of her childhood home finally succeeds in winning the house back, only to discover that it does not hold the key to her happiness, and perhaps never did. In "Greyhound People," a woman repeatedly, and purposely, takes the wrong bus home from work after meeting its warm and disarmingly candid cast of passengers, a refreshing and life-changing break from the coldly polite company she finds on the "right" bus-and at home.

In story after story, insight joins with grace to show us the truth about the lives of people around us. A moving and elegant collection and the capstone to the brilliant career of one of the most beloved American writers of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The late, great Alice Adams mastered the art of the short story. In the posthumous collection The Stories of Alice Adams, Adams masters something more significant in the genre--the backstory, the carefully realized context in which a story is able to unfold. In the 53 stories collected here, Adams moves effortlessly between the current thread of the situation and the past circumstances that allow it to happen in the first place. Nearly all of her carefully drawn characters look back at their lives, or at someone else's life, as if to reconstruct what makes a particular person unique. A group of friends awaits a newly widowed husband in "Waiting for Stella," and in their suppositions about his grief and tardiness, the dead woman comes back to life as a prominent character. Adams weaves youth, age, past, and present together seamlessly; she darts in and out of people's heads in a restaurant, as in "At the Beach," so that they wonder about each other thoroughly but never interact. In this stellar compilation, Adams revels in the glories and oddities of the human condition and distills the very essence of how we live. --Emily Russin

From Publishers Weekly

In her long and prolific career, Adams produced five collections of stories (as well as 11 novels). Now, three years after her death, Knopf is republishing 53 of those deft and delicate stories in one volume, reprising Adams's career. Readers already in love with Adams will be pleased to re-encounter-and those new to her pleased to discover-the seemingly offhand openings that carry the reader deep into the story, the swift characterizations, the effortless shifts in point of view and, of course, the almost casual but dazzling sentences. Most often the protagonists are women, usually negotiating love. But Adams also wrote affectingly about mothers and daughters; the seeds for the many mother/daughter novels of the '80s and '90 must lie in her stories. Adams might have been the first to write about the hippie mother going from one abusive boyfriend to another ("By the Sea"); in the ravishing "Roses, Rhododendrons," a girl befriends the Farrs, a family with high-class pretensions, while her envious mother watches from afar. Adams often wrote about the privileged and famous, portraying actresses, concert pianists, even heiresses with deliciously messy lives. But she wrote with an awareness that privilege comes and goes and is often hard-won. Taken together, these stories betray the changing mores of the past half-century; taken in sequence, they trace the changes in the American short story over the past 40 years, some of those changes wrought by Adams herself. Adams could have been characterizing her own work when she described the Farrs' yard in "Roses, Rhododendrons": "The effect was rich and careless, generous and somewhat mysterious. I was deeply stirred." As will be her readers.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (November 5, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375412859
• ISBN-13: 978-0375412851
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,924,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alice Adams's short fiction, forty years in the lives of American women, February 19, 2010

By 

Anonymous (Truth or Consequences, NM) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stories of Alice Adams (Paperback)

Adams may be the most underrated American woman short story writer of the later twentieth century. The other two reviewers seem to have missed all the subtlety and artistry of these fine stories, which deal with racism, women's work and relationships, and the triumph of individual spirit over cliched expectations.

3.0 out of 5 stars Not As Good As I Remembered, August 6, 2010

By 

H. Anderson (los angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Stories of Alice Adams (Hardcover)

I read most of these stories when they were first published, many of them in the New Yorker, and loved them. Maybe it's because I was younger, but when new the stories impressed me enormously, both for their plots and Adams's writing style. This time around, most of them left me cold; they were mannered and remote in comparison to today's stories. I suppose Adams's writing is simply out of style, but it came as a huge surprise.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid, September 28, 2008

By 

Cosmoetica "cosmoeticadotcom" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stories of Alice Adams (Paperback)

I came upon a $4.99 edition of The Stories Of Alice Adams. Her name was familiar as a staple of the New Yorker-Harper's-Atlantic axis of late 20th Century literature. Yet, I need not have known that fact for after reading the tales it was clear that her stories were perfectly constructed into the tidy formulae needed to get an in into that world. This is not to say that she was a bad writer, just that she was predictable and formulaic. In a sense she was the John Updike of short stories, save she had a better understanding of the human condition- certainly not a great one, but better than Updike.

Here's a typical Alice Adams story: a great opening paragraph with a twist that makes it stand out, WASPy Southern self-loathing characters- usually female artistes, a mushy middle with rather banal conversations, and a trip to an exotic locale, or the introduction of an odd character, a smattering of yuppies and wannabe sophisticates, and a very weak ending. Of course, in the book of 53 tales there are some exceptions, and these tend to be the best of the stories. Most of the tales that deal with love tend to veer toward the sudsy- definitely at about the level of a typical soap opera character. I could net get Susan Lucci's Erica Kane character from All My Children out of my head in tale after tale of high class heroines. Yet, it is a very artificial emotional plane. While not as utterly void as a John Updike character, nor as ragingly impotent as a Raymond Carver hero, the typical Adam's character has the dull life of a Willa Cather character, yet with pomp, the small emotional situation of a Eudora Welty character, save for letting it play in a nicer, richer world, and the hypocrisy and self-delusion of a Fitzgerald character, save for living in a more modern time. All in all a mixed stew of potentials. Unfortunately, probably because she was getting published so regularly in the New Yorker magazine, this stunted her growth as a writer, so that the above mentioned characteristics did not become leaping off points, but the perimeter of her fiction from the 1950s till her death in 1999.

Thus, her tales are, with few exceptions, all from an aging omniscient third person, yet female, point of view. The stories, in many ways are interchangeable, and too long. It's like living in a world of gray people, in which shades of hue are minor to the reader and character. Unlike a Welty or a Flannery O'Connor, the Adams archetype is a predictably Freudian Women's Libber with faithless lover, alcohol problems, a pet substituting for a man, and a raging libido, yet, almost always plagued with a desire to dash that in one form or another.

Here is a typically good Adams opening paragraph, from the typically soap operatic tale Snow, about four people and their tribulations:



On a trail high up in the California Sierra, between heavt smooth white snowbanks, four people on cross-country skis form a straggling line. A man and three women: Graham, dark and good-looking, a San Francisco architect, who is originally from Georgia; Carol, his girlfriend, a grey-eyed blonde, a florist; Susannah, daughter of Graham, dark and fat and now living in Venice, California; and, quite a way behind Susannah, tall thin Rose, Susannah's friend and lover. Susannah and Rose both have film-related jobs- Graham has never been quite sure what they do.

Note the last sentence, which sets up a hint of something needed to be unraveled or possibly resolved. It's a small detail, but the sort of little things that propels people through life, in a real way.

Now its end, and, regardless of what the tale in between was, look at how utterly flaccid and banal this paragraph is- dramatically and verbally:



In the middle of the night, in what has become a storm- lashing snow and violent wind- Rose wakes up, terrified. From the depths of bad dreams, she has no idea where she is, what time it is, what day. With whom she is. She struggles for clues, her wide eyes scouring the dark, her tentative hands reaching out, encountering Susannah's familiar, fleshy back. Everything comes into focus for her; she knows where she is. She breathes out softly, `Oh, thank God it's you,' moving closer to her friend.

Note how every sentence is trite and every modifier predictable- this is clichéd writing at its worse, but now return to the opening paragraph. In that declivity you see the starting and ending points for virtually every Adams tale- a promising start, but a banal, predictable end. Adams had potential greatness, but a propensity for copping out narratively. Whether this was her natural self's fault or the need to crank out fodder for the magazines that published her does not matter. But, at least it got her published by the Big Boys.