YOU HAVE THE WRONG MAN: Stories - Hardcover

Flook, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679431845 ISBN 13: 9780679431848

Publisher: Pantheon, 1996

Synopsis

Flook's stories enter the raw sanctuaries where men and women connect, and in these eight unveiled liaisons sexual desire is presented in its deepest reaches and its full human scale. In "Rhode Island Fish Company" a woman's maternal instincts run amok and kindle a startling betrayal; in "Prince of Motown" a household enters a crazed bereavement when Marvin Gaye is murdered; in "Lane" a man volunteers a point-by-point confession of threatening, bitter lust. These are only a few of the edgy coercions between men and women in stories that illuminate the moral tests and erotic pressures that tear up couples and unhinge families.
In writing that is both psychologically precise and funny, relationships are worn down by carnal debts, hardships, and cold-blooded consummations, but these characters find reprieve as Flook evokes their purest motives - not just to survive, but to survive for one another.

About this title

About the Author:

Maria Flook, a 2007 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, is the author of the nonfiction books, My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, and New York Times Bestseller Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod . Her fiction includes the novels Lux, Open Water, Family Night, which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, and a collection of stories, You Have the Wrong Man . She has also published two collections of poetry, Sea Room and Reckless Wedding, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, More Magazine, and others.  She is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A frustratingly uneven first collection, by the young author of the novels Family Night (1992) and Open Water (1995). Flook's fiction tends to feature embattled families and almost operatically strained relationships, and that preference for excess is numbingly manifested in these eight longish stories. The book's title, which implies a protestation of innocence, in fact announces her emphases on women who love unwisely and not very well (and also, to be sure, on men who are themselves, in crucial and catastrophic ways, ``wrong'' for their women). But her weaker stories stretch beyond Flook's range: ``Exchange Street,'' for example, is a predictable borderline-sentimental tale of a transvestite and ``her'' lover stubbornly seeking gainful employment and self-respect; and ``Prince of Motown'' is more sociology than fiction, involving a drug-addicted teenage father mourning the death of singer Marvin Gaye, his white young wife, and their ``mixed'' baby, and the threats of further abuse and disillusionment that follow her even as she finds ``shelter.'' Flook's vivid style is both distinguished and marred by in-your- face imagery, which is sometimes powerfully compact (``an ambulance strobed over the granite of an opposite building''), sometimes wildly over the top (``the young mother cradled her baby with the dumb ambivalence of a frozen peach tree holding a Sterno pot in its iced branches''). The better stories here, which hold both the high-powered prose and the melodramatic details essentially in check, include a sardonic medical student's raffish account of his inconstant love affair with a self-absorbed writer (``Lane''), and ``The Golden Therapist,'' an ingeniously developed portrayal of a secretive bank employee unhappy in marriage and fatherhood, seeking the consolations of adultery and sexual fantasy: It's a terrific vision of accumulating quotidian despair, powered by fresh and startling images and metaphors. Deeply flawed--and almost as deeply interesting--work from an ambitious writer who's obviously still finding her material and her voice, and who may yet produce much better fiction. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679431845
• ISBN 13: 9780679431848
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241