From Publishers Weekly
Brown's ( The Children's Crusade ) collection of short stories is not for the light-hearted or optimistic. Throughout she traces unfulfilled lesbians in unsuccessful relationships, bearing burdens of pain that cannot be purged even by self-mutilation. The symbolic meaning underneath these often allegorical tales is most directly presented in a story about a woman carrying a burdensome bag on her back. Even after burying the bag, the narrator cannot escape its weight and remains waiting. The women who inhabit these gothic landscapes are all waiting for something, whether the commitment of a lover caught up in her own life or the return of a lover for whom a narrator has given her right arm, quite literally. Unfortunately, Brown is not able to present any picture of what sort of fruit all of this waiting around might bear. In an allegory on radical feminism, Brown sets up a conflict in a kingdom of gender oppression between a resistance movement and Lady Bountiful, who once flirted with the resistance but instead abandoned her principles, and her lover, to marry Lord Bountiful. This story offers the most action and most developed characters in the collection but suffers from self-righteousness.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A debut collection of eight stories--by the American author of The Haunted House (1986) and The Children's Crusade--that was first published two years ago in England. These edgy, intense, and relentlessly abstract fictions are reminiscent of Brown's most obvious precursor, Djuna Barnes. Like Barnes, Brown explores the boundaries of erotic and emotional life in imagistic prose. Her neo-gothic sensibility reduces narrative to its essence and insists on the literal dimension of figurative language. When the narrator of ``Forgiveness'' promises to give her right arm for love, her lover bronzes the amputated limb. ``The Dark House'' and ``Isle of Skye'' are allegories of passion and betrayal in a world where female lovers explore each other like foreign countries, giving new meaning to the notion of wanderlust. The betrayed lover-narrator of ``Junk Mail'' searches for the secret meaning in her generic mail- -until the post delivers her lost body parts. The narrator who plays doctor in ``Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume'' extracts a heart made of candy from her faithless lover. But if love inevitably leads to dismemberment in Brown's linked stories, there can be no forgiveness or healing. Desire shrouded in secrecy--and scorned by many--results in social hypocrisy as well (``Lady Bountiful and the Underground Resistance''). In the meantime, the landscape may be devastated in ``The Ruined City,'' but this last story ends with a chilling affirmation, a literally ``resurrected heart.'' With her stainless-steel prose, Brown surgically dissects ambivalent hearts--and also those that pulse with the love that here never speaks its name. --
Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
