There are some short-story writers who seem too knowing, too eager to nudge the reader in the ribs with an authorial elbow. Others seem not knowing enough, as if they'd never quite gotten a purchase on their material. But in her first collection, Foreign Brides, Elena Lappin has already discovered the golden mean. Her tales of emigrant life--and more specifically, intermarriage among the tribes of Israel, Russia, England, and the United States--are unfailingly witty. Yet the author never keeps herself too far above the fictional fray, which ensures that the pain in these stories is no mere postmodernist construct but, well, painful.
In "Noa and Noah," for example, an Israeli bride finds herself hard-pressed to adjust to British life, even if her new husband does sport an Old Testament moniker and a kippa. In fact, Noah's charms have almost entirely evaporated after a year of marriage, and what once appeared to be endearments turn out to be a form of erotic cheerleading:
She had also by now finally deciphered and demystified her husband's sexy mumblings which invariably accompanied their lovemaking: the words Arsenal and Tottenham came up a lot, with very unsexy adjectives describing various players and plaintive remarks about their technique. When she had first grasped this remarkable fact, Noa simply asked Noah why he had to think and talk about football during sex. He had answered, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, that he thought about football all the time, and saying his thoughts out loud during sex helped him slow down.It would be unfair to disclose Noa's response to her increasing disillusionment. Suffice it to say that it involves a neighborhood butcher and some very nonkosher behavior in the boudoir. Not all of Lappin's characters hit upon such delectable (and surprisingly low-fat!) solutions. In "Peacocks," a similarly distraught émigrée falls back on cab driving and a spot of extortion to maintain her mental health. "Bad Writing" features a German transplant, also a woman, who neutralizes the nastiness of her marriage by turning it into prose. Not every story in Foreign Brides quite clicks. But Lappin is a funny and formidable talent, and her next project--a novel with the intriguing, Gogolian title of The Nose--should be worth sniffing out as soon as it hits the shelves. --Anita Urquhart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The jerky rhythms and brute candor of the 12 stories in Lappin's first collection arise from the imperfect, second-language English spoken by the author's brazen heroines. Sexually promiscuous and emotionally detached, these "foreign" women naturalize, even as the men they are involved with turn alienAby disappearing or proving themselves unknowable. Noa, of "Noa and Noah" (who is an Israeli, like many of Lappin's characters), thinks "**** that" to keeping kosher for the sake of her British husband, NoahAa supercilious, newly moneyed debt collector who picked her up in a Tel Aviv disco and moved her into his chrome-and-glass London flat. In Noa's halting English we learn that her husband's pillow talk is nothing more than a play-by-play of England soccer matches; frustrated and contemptuous, she begins an affair with Joe McElligot, a butcher whose non-kosher beef she serves to Noah nightly. In "Inhaling New York" the insatiable Sasha seduces Jack, a cold-fish British journalist whose one passion is Manhattan. When they move to London, Jack becomes a "polite, formal shell of a man." In this story, as elsewhere in the collection, flashes of violence engender intimacy: when Jack slaps Sasha (who, in her rebellion, has refused to select a name for their infant son) and she slaps him back, there is suddenly "bliss in the air." Lappin collapses time with a facility that can seem a little smug and too omniscient. This impulse to answer all the questions is most troublesome at these stories' ends. Often the bizarre, compelling and complex characters she creates unaccountably come to accept their lives in too-convenient fashion in the narrative's final paragraphs. The collection, nonetheless, winningly combines a deadpan brassiness with an observant and satirical restraint.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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