5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
my best short story find since lorrie moore, November 13, 2004
This review is from: Unkempt: Stories (Hardcover)
This is a terrific read, funny and tragic and powerful. It's a little edgy like Lorrie Moore, but much more intimate, more personal. You're really inside the characters' thoughts, which are mostly going at warp speed. The tone is urban and energetic, not to mention pretty neurotic most of the time. These are characters with Issues, and usually they're quite aware of them. One woman is deathly afraid of sharks in swimming pools -- she knows there are not sharks in swimming pools, but she's constructed a very elaborate rationale for her fears. But the anxieties and neuroses are cut with great personal warmth and intimacy, not to mention great humor. Even the title story, which develops from a rather breezy look at a woman estranged from her daughter to a very intense and direct portrait of What
Went Wrong, even this story has some laugh-out-loud material. It ends on a nicely optimistic note, too. The Former World Record Holder of the last story, whose record was as pornographic as records get, she settles down and discovers her Inner Wife and Bowler. And it's beautifully plausible, beautifully real, like all these stories.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Consciousness made unsimple, August 24, 2004
This review is from: Unkempt: Stories (Hardcover)
It's easy to coast along and admire the breadth of vernacular on display in Unkempt and forget that there is one virtuostic voice at work, and she hears EVERYTHING -- every fragment of consciousness, every syllable of contemporary anguish, every exhalation. There are a lot of writerly fragments and run-ons running amok out there, but these are the most perfectly flawed sentences I've seen in many years. Eldridge has an incredible perception of what's going on in the minds of apparently everyone who walks down her street, and a rhythmic sensibility for making it understood. While all of these stories at first appear to be messy tangents, they serve as well-scrubbed mirrors.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mayra Calvani -- Curled Up With A Good Book, December 3, 2006
In this original, brilliant collection of short stories, New Yorker Courtney Eldridge offers us a twisted, askew glimpse into the darkest corners of the human mind and the fears of our present society. Eldridge does this with a razor-sharp eye, candidness, and a wacky sense of humor.
Unkempt has seven stories and one novella, and presents an array of desperate and pathetic characters who either are trying to cope with the helplessness of their lives, or are completely and painfully unaware of it: a blocked writer who systematically erases everything she writes, a woman who thinks there are sharks in regular swimming pools, a lady who is unaware she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, a clerk at a retail store who is accosted by demented customers, an alcoholic mother who can't understand her daughter's behaviour, and ex-porn star who now is trying to keep her first "real" relationship afloat... these are some of the characters you'll meet in this darkly hilarious anthology.
The author's writing style can be quite smothering at times, as no quotation marks or new paragraphs are used to separate dialogue. It is a clever technique to infuse the same feelings of "confusion" and "desperation" to the reader as the ones the character is feeling. That said, Eldridge's writing is incredibly revealing and illuminating. In fact, the ability to combine these two aspects is Eldridge's gift. The following passage, taken from "Sharks," perfectly exemplifies the writing style used throughout the book:
"You honestly believe there are sharks at the Sol Goldman Y? I asked. It's not about believing; it's about my fear. This is my fear I'm talking about. I got that much, I said. Well, there you go, she said. You asked, I told you. No, you're right, okay. But tell me this, what happens if you get into a swimming pool? I asked. I don't unless I have to, she said. But if you went to a pool, wouldn't you be able to see the sharks, swimming around in the pool? I mean, wouldn't somebody notice that there was a shark in the pool? Or do they have a cloaking device, too? Very funny, she says, but the answer is no. No, you wouldn't necessarily see them. They just wait, she said. You mean the sharks wait somewhere in the pool? I asked, clarifying again. Yes, she said. Where? Where would they wait, the drain? I don't know where they might be waiting, see, that's the thing. They could me waiting anywhere. Of course, I said."
Some passages, like the one above, made this reviewer laugh out loud. Yet the message is undeniably troubling: people live in irrational fear these days, and this specific story can very well serve as an allegory for the present state of terrorism. Though Eldridge's style is different in many ways, it is in some aspects similar to Tama Janowitz's. Certainly both combine the sharp eye, dark hilarity, and askew angles of probing into the deepest corners of the human mind. If there's only one negative comment to say about this collection, that would have to be a certain lack of versatility. The stories are original, but the "voice" behind all of them at times sound the same. However, this doesn't take away the fact that Unkempt is an intriguing, fascinating anthology, one this reviewer is very glad to have read.
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