Maclin Bocock is indeed a citizen of the world, and through her stories, the reader travels from Virginia barns to Parisian bedrooms, from autobiography to magical realism and, eventually, to the end of civilization as we know it. It's a long, far-ranging journey, but if the reader can handle a few bumpy transitions--even in some cases, the literary equivalent of whiplash--they'll find this book well worth the trip. In the first section, nostalgic stories of a Southern girlhood explore the irrevocable divide between black and white worlds. In "The Funeral," for instance, a black servant fakes her own death and tells the narrator she's a witch. ("After midnight, several times a week, she raised her bedroom window and flew about the town doing nice things for people. 'Don't you ever go out the front door?' Aretha thought for a moment. 'No. I got to have the elevation.'") "Play Me 'Stormy Weather,' Please" takes a more tragic turn, as a young girl is forced to renounce an interracial friendship the adult world won't tolerate.
The book's subsequent sections veer farther and farther from these down-home roots, using their dazzling settings (Morocco, Mexico, and France) to show off a variety of techniques, from surrealism to psychological suspense. "The Baker's Daughter" is a Russian fable that contains elements of fairy tale, history, tragedy, and even farce--most notably when the lovers first meet, as the hero's mount drops dead in its tracks: "How many soon-to-be lovers have exchanged their first words over the body of a dead horse?" "La Humanidad" envisions a grim postapocalyptic world, while the title story is a riveting tale of espionage and one woman's search for identity. Simply put, Bocock is never the same writer twice. Not every one of these stories works perfectly, but their very diversity is a commendable feat of courage and imagination. --Chloe Byrne
From Publishers Weekly
In her introduction to this striking collection of short fiction, Alice Hoffman describes Bocock as a writer who "has long been admired by other writers." The novella and 12 finely wrought stories offered here (five previously published by John Daniel in Heaven Lies About) prove Bocock has been honing her craft and distilling her work. In lean but lyrical prose, Bocock conjures diverse narrators for tales of remarkable variety. Her lapidary prose can as easily capture the arrogance of a European bureaucrat in northern Africa as the loneliness of an expatriate in Paris, or the strains between a young couple on a delayed honeymoon trip in the Southwest. The first five stories are set in the South, depicting swiftly but quietly some life-changing losses: of childhood, friends, parents, illusions. The most moving of these entries is "Play Me 'Stormy Weather,' Please," which tells of best friends, a white girl and a black boy, whose families separate them when they are on the verge of adolescence, and of love. With her gift for compression, Bocock manages to make the attraction between the boy and girl strong but unstated, but the story's real power grows out of an incident, narrated in counterpoint, by the girl, now a grandmother, who is mugged in Washington, D.C., by a man she is convinced is the son (or grandson) of her long-ago friend. In the title story, a Boston-born daughter of Jewish refugees flees to Paris and travels to the Soviet Union in an attempt to embrace an identity her parents rejected. A recurring theme in these narratives is the power struggle within a marriage. In "The Face," a wife obsessed with protecting her artist husband all but imprisons him, while in the folktale-like "The Baker's Daughter," a husband usurps his wife's bakery, confining her to her room while he grows wealthy. The complex novella, "Alice and Me," depicts the reaction of a wife to her husband's betrayal, embracing in its closing passages both the hard and practical solution of living with infidelity and the possibility of dying for the demands of love. One of the rewards of Bocock's fiction is that it does not give up its secrets easily. These are rich, compressed stories that draw the reader in, venturing into familiar territory in unfamiliar ways and moving fearlessly into uncharted terrain.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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