Amazon.com Review
If Susan Perabo wrote pop songs instead of fiction, they'd be filled with the kinds of hooks that get stuck in one's head for hours. The first line of nearly every story in her debut,
Who I Was Supposed to Be, is a testament to her infectiousness. Just
try to read these openings without wanting to unravel the whole yarn:
My mother, beside herself with loss, spent thirty-five thousand dollars on lottery tickets in nine months.
After the baby died, I found it imperative that my German shepherd Stu understand and accept the concept of death.
I was twelve the summer I watched four men beat up my father on a softball field at his company picnic.
Quirky Americans populate Perabo's stories, playing their unusual circumstances straight-faced for laughs. Unfortunately, Perabo often starts with a great premise but doesn't get too far with it. "Retirement," the story of Batman's assassination told from the point of view of his butler, Alfred, falls curiously flat, in want of a little more literary "OOF!" and "POW!" In "Counting the Ways," Katy, wasting her life in a thankless data-entry job, comes into an inheritance and blows the whole thing on a dress once worn by Princess Di. When the Princess meets her tragic fate, the dress skyrockets in value, and Katy debates whether or not she should sell it. Instead of exploiting this inner turmoil, Perabo leaves the story in the hands of her character's clueless and ineffectual husband, Joel.
Many of these stories feel as though Perabo let her unique vision of America become diluted by academic expectations about what constitutes the form--conflict, irrational action, emotionally vague denouement. It's a shame when she succumbs to sounding like every other short-story writer on the block, but a wonder when her own voice shines through. --Ryan Boudinot
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Beset by the infelicities of modern-day dysfunctionalism, the characters in these 11 unfaltering stories imagine radical, often desperate, but never easy answers for the questions wracking their ordinary, anxious lives. Perabo leavens the pervasive dysphoria of these tales with humor and an abiding faith in human resilience, relieving the tragic with the whimsical and regarding the hopeless with a shrug. The first story, "Thick as Thieves," centers around an accomplished, declining film star in a flashy but soulless Hollywood milieu, who copes with his 80-year-old fatherApractically a strangerAwho's intent on burglarizing the posh neighbors. A bungled heist sends the father home a diminished kleptomaniac, but not before his son concedes the allure of the performance. Other selections explore the heartbreaking, even seductive escape of financial fantasies: a widow who spends $900 a week on lottery tickets; a nearly insolvent couple who blow their modest inheritance on a dress once belonging to Princess Diana. In other stories, losers and winners keep changing places. One man, recently divorced after nearly 30 years of marriage, is mugged on Christmas Eve and feigns amnesia to win back his ex-wife; a junior high boy watches his father get savagely beaten by four men; two pubescent best friends kill a school bully and end up losing each other. Perabo deftly narrates from the perspectives of different genders and ages, and she speaks with intimacy, authenticity and authority whether telling the tale of a woman whose baby has just died, relaying the awkward conversation in a small-town Gamblers Anonymous meeting or presenting parents and children, grown or growing, in all their complicated humanity. Her limber, multivalenced voice heartily sustains this debut collection suffused with vivid, sharp dialogue and solid, satisfying characters. Agent, Elyse Cheney. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
