"Every woman gets a call like this sooner or later. The phone rings, a man says: 'This is a voice from your past.'" The opening of the compelling title story of Merrill Joan Gerber's collection sets the tone for each of the thirteen remarkable pieces therein, two of them previously unpublished. Set mostly in Southern California—in seemingly peaceful, suburban households—Gerber's stories expose the raw, sometimes murderous impulses normally hidden beneath the facade of middle-class life. From the vulnerable women of "I Don't Believe This" and "Night Stalker" to the increasingly paranoid housewife of "Dogs Bark"; from the ferocious infighting of family life in "We Know That Your Hearts Are Heavy," "A Daughter of My Own," and "Latitude" to the sudden triumphs of unexpected revelation in "Approval" and "See Bonnie & Clyde Death Car," Merrill Joan Gerber's powerful collection confirms her place among the ranks of America's best fiction writers.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Veteran novelist, memoirist and short story author Gerber (Stop Here, My Friend) demonstrates her prowess in several of these compelling stories. The title tale is hands-down the most entertaining, thrusting readers into an established writer's life as she receives a call out of the blue from a college friend, Ricky, the most gifted writer in her class who somehow lost that "window of opportunity" to his success and is now transient and unstable. The narrator is married with small babies, a busy teacher of writing, who nonetheless welcomes the lost writer back into her life, but soon learns what a liability he is. In several of the stories, the suicide of the narrator's brother-in-law takes precedence. In "I Don't Believe This," first published in The Atlantic, two mature sisters take refuge from a menacing husband, who threatens to kill himself if his wife doesn't come back to him-and he eventually does, to everyone's amazement. The suicide reemerges in the story "My Suicides," an eerie recollection of deaths of friends, including a more detailed version of the abusive brother-in-law's suicide, which the narrator tries to comprehend: "And I, in my quiet home, with my children and my good husband, in my measured and reasoned life, became an accomplice to his fury." "Latitude," first published in the New Yorker, is a lovely, cut-and-dried drama of a young married woman enjoying her newly won power over her hateful in-laws, while the last story, "Dogs Bark," pursues the decade-long revenge that a couple endures living next to a family with obnoxiously loud dogs. Overall, Gerber demonstrates power in her prose style, skill in her characterizations-though there is some inconsistency in the narrative tone of the middle stories, which read like chapters of novels. Hers is a work of substance and intelligence.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Seasoned novelist and memoirist Gerber provides another collection of deceptively quiet short stories. Her matter-of-fact tone lulls the initially unsuspecting reader into a state of complacency before shocking layers of hidden truths are peeled away one at a time. The very middle-class ordinariness of her female characters contrasts starkly with the complexity of issues they must deal with during the course of their daily lives. Love, death, suicide, relationships, verbal and physical abuse, and emotional power struggles are recurrent themes in a series of stories that lucidly illuminate the intensity of everyday living. This seriously underrated and often-overlooked writer has the ability to speak volumes in the short-story format. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review from the LA Times, Jan 17 2005,
By A Reader (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: This Is a Voice from Your Past: New & Selected Stories (Hardcover)
January 17, 2005 BOOK REVIEW Some shrewd but subtle observations about family This Is a Voice From Your Past: New and Selected Stories; Merrill Joan Gerber; Ontario Review Press: 220 pp., $23.95 By Merle Rubin, Special to The Times If, as critic A. Alvarez maintains, voice is the essence of good writing, Merrill Joan Gerber has a voice that is hard to forget: forceful, unvarnished, at times even vehement, a lot like Philip Roth's. Although Gerber may lack Roth's outrageous sense of humor, his sheer inventiveness and his free-ranging engagement with politics, society and culture, she is capable of the same kind of emotional intensity and raw power. And, when it comes to depicting the nuances of personal relationships, she can be shrewder, subtler and more telling. Indeed, few modern writers can match Gerber's portrayal of the strains, embarrassments and satisfactions of family life, the subject that has inspired her best work for the last four decades in novels such as "An Antique Man" and "King of the World" and in the many short stories she has written. Her latest story collection, "This Is a Voice From Your Past," offers a representative baker's dozen, some new, some previously published. Creative-writing teachers constantly tell students to write about what they know. Gerber certainly exemplifies this approach, and many of the stories in this collection demonstrate her gift for transforming personal experience into art. Originally published in the New Yorker, "We Know That Your Hearts Are Heavy" is narrated in the first person by Gerber's longtime fictional alter ego Janet, who in this story is still a recent newlywed living in Boston with her husband, Danny, a graduate student. Janet's favorite uncle has died, but her parents don't want her to go to the funeral. Tired of being sheltered by them, she insists. She is surprised, however, indeed "shocked," when Danny volunteers to come with her: "I had been imagining this as a private family affair. Danny does not like families, and he will not like mine. None of them are the kind of people we would have for friends, but I feel for them something akin to love, which makes them bearable, while Danny has no reason at all (except that I am his wife) to be tolerant of their crudities and illiteracies." In "Latitude" we meet the formidable in-laws of a Janet-and-Danny-like couple called Martha and Will. Although narrated in the third person, it is every bit as revealing. Gerber is superb at portraying characters in the grip of crude, harsh emotions, as in Martha's memory of how bitterly Will's parents had opposed their engagement: "His mother had turned purple. 'What right have you to ruin my son's life? Who do you think you are, trying to make a boy into a man. He's still a baby. Look at her!' she cried to her husband. 'Look how she holds his hand! Look at them!' " The raw stuff of fiction She is just as adept at portraying the subtlest of intimacies, as in this scene, where the now-peaceable in-laws are at Will and Martha's for dinner, watching Ed Sullivan and playing with their new granddaughter: "[Martha] caught Will looking over his paper at her, and when their eyes met he winked, and then, embarrassed, glanced uncomfortably around the room to make sure that no one had seen him." Sometimes, even Gerber pays a price for being too close to her own experiences, lacking the perspective and creative energy to transform the raw material into powerful fiction. This seems to be the problem in "My Suicides," which simply recounts the cases of five people she knew who killed themselves, and in "Dogs Bark," a grim chronicle of the writer's 15-year-long battle with a neighbor who refused to make any effort to prevent her giant watchdogs from howling and barking their heads off at all hours of the day and night. Gerber also ventures further afield, casting herself into the minds and hearts of characters very different from herself. "Honeymoon" takes us into the mind of a pretty blond 19-year-old department store clerk who marries a much older, thrice-divorced gambling man who takes her to Las Vegas on what proves to be a disillusioning honeymoon. Some stories are less convincing, and Gerber's usual emotional honesty is oddly mixed with or, more accurately, swallowed up by a surprisingly timorous evasiveness in "Tell Me Your Secret." The narrator, Franny, begins by telling us in intimate detail about a life-changing incident she experienced as a 1950s college coed, but her account breaks off before telling us what actually happened. All, and more, is poignantly revealed in "Approval," a brief but well-nigh perfect story full of surprises. Once again, we're back with Will and Martha; this time, it's Martha's father who is the source of a tension less blatant than the one engendered by her in-laws, but not a whit less significant or real: the strain between the two men she loves, her father and her husband. In plain clear language incapable of disguise or pretension, Gerber discloses the source of the pain and, with a charity equal to her clarity, celebrates the satisfaction that comes with understanding. Merle Rubin is a contributing writer for Book Review.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Publishers Weekly Review,
By clavman "book reader" (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: This Is a Voice from Your Past: New & Selected Stories (Hardcover)
[] This Is a Voice from Your Past: New & Selected Stories
Gerber, Merrill Joan (Author) ISBN: 0865381135 Ontario Review Press Published 2005-01 Hardcover , $23.95 (200p) Short Stories (single author) Reviewed 2005-01-31 Veteran novelist, memoirist and short story author Gerber (Stop Here, My Friend) demonstrates her prowess in several of these compelling stories. The title tale is hands-down the most entertaining, thrusting readers into an established writer's life as she receives a call out of the blue from a college friend, Ricky, the most gifted writer in her class who somehow lost that "window of opportunity" to his success and is now transient and unstable. The narrator is married with small babies, a busy teacher of writing, who nonetheless welcomes the lost writer back into her life, but soon learns what a liability he is. In several of the stories, the suicide of the narrator's brother-in-law takes precedence. In "I Don't Believe This," first published in The Atlantic, two mature sisters take refuge from a menacing husband, who threatens to kill himself if his wife doesn't come back to him-and he eventually does, to everyone's amazement. The suicide reemerges in the story "My Suicides," an eerie recollection of deaths of friends, including a more detailed version of the abusive brother-in-law's suicide, which the narrator tries to comprehend: "And I, in my quiet home, with my children and my good husband, in my measured and reasoned life, became an accomplice to his fury." "Latitude," first published in the New Yorker, is a lovely, cut-and-dried drama of a young married woman enjoying her newly won power over her hateful in-laws, while the last story, "Dogs Bark," pursues the decade-long revenge that a couple endures living next to a family with obnoxiously loud dogs. Overall, Gerber demonstrates power in her prose style, skill in her characterizations-though there is some inconsistency in the narrative tone of the middle stories, which read like chapters of novels. Hers is a work of substance and intelligence. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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