Characters on the Loose: Stories - Softcover

Kauffman, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555972527 ISBN 13: 9781555972523

Publisher: Graywolf Pr, 1997

Synopsis

Book by Kauffman, Janet

About this title

Review:

Perhaps like olives or Brussels sprouts, minimalist fiction is an acquired taste. Flat, telegraphed accounts of lives so ordinary as to be practically invisible are the provinces of the minimalist writer, and in such stripped-down environments, one misstep is enough to send a story spiralling into the abyss of bad writing that is both affected and ridiculous. Fortunately, writer Janet Kauffman has an excellent sense of balance. In earlier collections, she has written eloquently, if sparely, of the inarticulate lives of farm families; a farmer herself, her hardscrabble stories are as real as the earth her characters tilled. In her short-story collection Characters on the Loose, Kauffman has decided to venture from the starkly real into the experimental.

In "26 Acts in 26 Letters," Kauffman presents an erotic alphabet, describing letters performing various sexual acts--complete with illustrations. In "Signed Away," she imagines Emily Dickinson on a bike trip. Not all of the stories in Characters on the Loose are quite as unusual as these, and several are vintage Kauffman. There's enough of the old Kauffman and the new in this collection to satisfy both her die-hard fans and those readers unafraid of something different.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Fifteen pieces from a veteran writer (The Body in Four Parts, 1993; Obscene Gestures for Women, 1989, etc.) that only sometimes get under the skin or into the heart. Kauffman gathers up symbols in a half-casual way so that they seem--whether they really do or not--to reverberate on a single theme. In ``Nightmares for Everybody,'' for example, two apparently gay boys and two adults watch a meteor shower--and one boy reveals that his unstable mother has written to him in her own menstrual blood. The same chance conjunction occurs in ``Girl Games,'' about one woman driving another into Detroit to visit her lover; the driver goes to read on the river front (``The words look like live things. . . . And put together, some of them even make sense''), where she has a Salinger-esque conversation with a little girl. Kauffman's seemingly effortless writerly skills are everywhere apparent, whether in sketches like ``The Ocean with Everything In It'' (a young man becomes obsessed with death), modernist exercises like ``Signed Away'' (surreal, Barthelme-inspired pages portray Emily Dickinson as a modern-day biker), or equally amusing group portraits like ``Baku's Theory'' (an ``immigrant support group'' is formed on the theory that ``It takes fifteen years to know where you are, and to know if it makes sense to be there''). At book's center is ``26 Acts in 26 Letters,'' a wildly inventive but exercise-bookish description of the sex lives of the alphabet (``At work, M's panties are streaked and sticky; N carries the Free Press with him to cover his erection''). Other love stories follow, as do more couples and more characters, including the eccentric Eureka of ``Eureka in Toledo, Weather Permitting,'' of whom the narrator says, arguably apropos of Kauffman, that ``She lurched through words, fell back, picked up a story somewhere else. She wasn't incoherent, but freewheeling, I would say.'' Skilled wordsmithing that's often brilliant, less often moving, and too often dusty in spite of itself. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1555972527
• ISBN 13: 9781555972523
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 183