Customer Reviews

Touchy Subjects: Stories

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bestselling Irish native Emma Donoghue (SLAMMERKIN) delivers a top-notch collection of 19 short stories featuring a variety of everyday characters caught in the middle of the unexpected. On the surface, each offering is grouped according to one of five themes: Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death. On a deeper level, these broadly defined boundaries intersect throughout many of the stories, as they often do in reality, creating a series of snapshots that are both unique and true to life.

Although there isn't a dud in her bunch, Donoghue shines most brightly when confronting issues of sex and gender. As seen in some of her previous works (HOOD, LIFE MASK), the trajectory of unrequited homosexual love is aptly explored here in moments that are so vulnerable and pure that they virtually explode with unresolved tension. In "Speaking in Tongues," a long-held thirst is finally quenched yet ultimately discarded after 17-year-old-Lee and 34-year-old poetess Sylvia have a one-night stand in the back of Sylvia's van. In "Team Men," two football players have a brief affair and must navigate the consequences when one wants to come out publicly and the other doesn't. Both stories highlight the rawness of desire and the inevitable heartbreak that occurs when separate wants can't (or don't) align.

Along similar lines, "The Cost of Things" and "The Man Who Wrote on Beaches" focus on two very different pairs and their shared inability to see eye to eye. In "The Cost of Things," a seemingly unbreakable relationship implodes after the two involved can't agree on how much their kitten's life (i.e. their relationship) is worth. In "The Man Who Wrote on Beaches," a man feels a sudden, joyous urge to become a father after finding God --- only his wife is now 42 and not in the mood to change diapers. It is the breaking point in a relationship that Donoghue finds so intriguing, and her repeated depictions of this moment are filled with a harsh authenticity that is liable to make many readers cringe in reluctant recognition, despite their varied circumstances.

There are thankfully a few humorous vignettes in this otherwise moody collection. "Pluck" reveals a husband's nagging obsession with a tiny hair growing underneath his wife's unbeknownst chin; the hilariously dry "Do They Know It's Christmas" features an academic couple and their collective indignation over the banning of their precious dogs --- Proust, Gide and Mallarmé --- from an annual family gathering; and the embarrassingly funny "Touchy Subjects" explores awkwardness at its best, when a husband agrees to be a sperm donor for his wife's best friend and must confront head on (pun intended) the trials of getting it up for a woman who isn't his partner. Although all touch upon the serious, these three selections show a different side of Donoghue and illustrate her versatility as a writer.

Donoghue's gift is her ability to grab the reader immediately and not let go until the events being described run their natural course. The stories in TOUCHY SUBJECTS take a crack at everything from pregnancy to marriage to the fleetingly intimate connection between strangers, and they do so beautifully and genuinely. Fans of her longer historical novels will relish in her clear mastery of the shorter form.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

In typical fashion, Donoghue adds a touch of irony to the title story, "Touchy Subjects", a thirty-eight-year old woman resorting to artificial means to accomplish pregnancy; the complications, while hilarious, are perfectly awful, a testament to the author's penchant for seeing beyond the surface of our encounters with destiny. It is in the nature of these stories to observe the characters through a series of transitions, captured in five stages: Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire and Death. The stories are related in a chronology of relationships: Babies about tentative beginnings, the impulses that alter the course of a life ("Expecting", "The Man Who Wrote on Beaches"); Domesticity unveils more advanced relationships, people caught in the complexities of daily frustrations, decisions and miscommunications, the small irritations that once were endearing now wearing thin, expectations denied, the infinite grinding down of hopes into less than what was anticipated ("Lavender's Blue", "The Cost of Things").

Strangers portends escape into more neutral territory, breaking from habit to find respite in another place, at least temporarily, exposing personal conceits, characters shocked into personal insights ("The Sanctuary of Hands", WritOr"); Desire speaks for itself, of yearning and angst and disappointment ("Speaking in Tongues", The Welcome"); and finally, Death, endings and sometimes beginnings, perceptions turned upside down by reality and the need to adapt to changed circumstances ("The Dormition of the Virgin", "Enchantment'). Unfailing, Donoghue prods the tender underbelly of human frailty, ever complicated and fraught with self-doubt, self-seeking behavior in search of connections, relentlessly dissecting the common denominator of relationships, straight or gay, the steady pulse of yearning that causes people to cling to one another in desperation. This is a world filled with the varieties of human behavior, the sequence of stories carefully structured for maximum effect, interactions that define the various stages of development.

More than a collection, Touchy Subjects has a theme, a progression viewed through the eyes of characters as they muddle through the passages of their lives. There are moments of hilarity, sweetness, insight and revelation, a kaleidoscope of humanity writ large on a canvas as intricate as those who people the pages. Observant, incisive and compassionate, Donoghue masters both form and content; whether mining the past or mapping the edges of the present, this is a writer who never disappoints. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

Touchy Subjects, is the title, and they are!
As my reading partner put it, "Nothing seems too odd or too off limits for her to write about - AND rope us into. I guess once you have written about a woman who churns out rabbits, you can handle just about any topic."
Emma's former book of short stories, The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, gets its title from the lead story, which is about a.... [go figure!] woman who feined giving birth to rabbits!
That book was excellent too, but this new one is even better.
Touchy Subjects: Babies, Domesticity, Strangers, Desire, and Death, and the stories found in each of these categories stay very centered around these themes.
These are nineteen deeply rich tales of the joys and struggles [mostly struggles] of love relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. And familial. And marital. Of friendships platonic and otherwise.
Of people reaching toward self-identity. Sometimes finding it, sometimes not.

I think that Emma Donoghue is "eccentric" in the best sense of the word.
Unconventional, slightly strange, and just off kilter enough to show her readers that they are the same!
That none of our lives are simple, or even normal. Her stories reveal a world full of ambiguities and contradictions, which is exactly the world any truly living person experiences.
She can take the most common of occurences [a woman looking at a clothes rack, a man writing phrases in the sand, someone looking absently and curiously through a woman's cosmetic case, a couple deciding upon the exact shade their house ought to be painted, the love of our pets, a 42-year old woman wanting to bear a child].... she can take these things and show us that they are all touchy [as in sensitive, delicate] subjects.
I realize I have not really said anything specific about the writer's style [per se] or her incomparable command of dialogue. I don't want to.
I want you to READ HER.

Emma Donoghue's latest collection of short stories is extraordinary. Each story is a perfectly polished gem, with the depth of characterization and emotion that you would expect from a great novel. And she's funny, too. Donoghue captures the family, with all its pain and humor, and her wry and compelling observations on relationships are not to be missed. If AOL allowed it, I would give this collection ten stars.

First off, I immensely enjoyed Donoghue's historical novel Slammerkin. Room was a good novel by her, also, in my opinion. Those two books were why I elected to try some more of Donoghue's works. This book has let me down in the worst way. To be fair, I read over half of it and I was bored out of my mind the entire time. The stories have no set plots. They just simply seem to capture various themed moments in different types of individual's lives - very, very dull moments. There were maybe two stories which I enjoyed the least bit: The Cost of Things and Touchy Subjects. As I was reading each story, I was just waiting for something - anything - to happen. But nothing ever did. By the end of each story I just felt as if I might as well have not read anything at all. Huge disappointment.

If you are looking at this review to consider reading a new author for you, what have you waited for? If you are her to read another Donoghue book, why do you hesitate? Irish born, Canadian Emma Donoghue is simply put, fabulous!! For me she is up there with or above the word smiths like Thomas Sanchez that are not widely known. READ THIS AUTHOR!! TOUCHY SUBJECTS is a collection of short stories, amazing little tales about life and discovery. Start here then maybe HOOD or SLAMMERKIN ( a classic already), or THE ROOM all wonderful books. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED