Men Giving Money, Women Yelling: Intersecting Stories - Hardcover

Mattison, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688151094 ISBN 13: 9780688151096

Publisher: William Morrow, 1997

Synopsis

Men Giving Money, Women Yelling is Alice Mattisons latest collection in which the characters lives are told in tales that overlap or echo one another. At the center of the stories is Denny Ring, a young man nobody quite knows. Other characters include John Corey, a contractor who renovates old houses in New Haven, Connecticut; his younger brother Eugene, a volunteer at a soup kitchen; and his older brother Cameron, who is a lawyer specializing in obnoxious law. Johns assistant, Tom, is in love with his former English teacher, Ida Feldman, and Charlotte LoPresti, a social worker who interviews the Corey brothers and their aged father, is friends with Pam Shepherd, a social worker whos in charge of the house for psychiatric patients that John and Tom are renovating.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Mattison is the award-winning author of four story collections and five novels, including Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn. She teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Reviews

Mattison treats each of her loony, alternately bored and besotted characters with tenderness....

Fifteen interlinked stories in a salty, tough-minded third collection from Mattison (Great Wits, 1988; The Flight of Andy Burns, 1993). Mattison, also a novelist (Hilda and Pearl, 1995, etc.), has a mordant eye for the details of our wary, confused search for love, and she focuses it here on the uncertain efforts of a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings in New Haven, Connecticut, to connect. There's Tom, who still carries a crush for Ida, a teacher he had in high school. Their sporadic courtship, from tentative dates to the decision on whether or not to marry, threads through the book. Kitty, Ida's roommate, finds herself struggling to jettison her still strong feelings for an old lover, and is not much helped in the process by the lukewarm attentions of a new one. The well-intentioned John, a contractor and Tom's brother-in-law, has his hands full dealing with a turbulent family, including his brothers Eugene (who works with the local down-and-out) and Cameron (an obnoxious, quarrelsome lawyer), and with his aged father. There's also Marta, a dance teacher who finds herself increasingly attracted to Marie, the mother of one of her teenage students, who in turn is dating the nasty Cameron. The large cast weaving through these tales might, in less deft hands, prove unmanageable. But Mattison keeps a keen focus here on the ways in which we court, seduce, rely on, or betray one another, and the stories, many told in the first person, explore our amatory confusions with frankness and vigor. There's not much interior musing here, for Mattison relies on a direct narrative of events and the complex, if ambiguous, messages that even simple interchanges can carry. Nor is there much sense of place. Still, if the stories sometimes seem exceedingly spare and even grim, they are nonetheless, at their best (as in ``The Dance Teacher,'' ``Apples,'' and ``Sebastian Squirrel''), both moving and entirely convincing. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The title of this new collection by Mattison--author of Hilda and Pearl (1995) and other novels and short fiction (including eight of the fifteen stories gathered here) published in The New Yorker, Boston Review, North American Review, and other journals--understates the range of gender behaviors in her pungent intertwined tales. Mattison's men renovate houses and volunteer at soup kitchens and practice "obnoxious law" and love (or fail to love) women who teach school and sell ice cream across a counter and supervise the arrangements for a halfway house for patients with mental illness. Sharing a Connecticut landscape as well as small inadequacies and occasional nobilities readers will recognize from their own circle of friends, these characters wander through one another's stories, sometimes as extras, sometimes catalysts. Where short fiction circulates, Mattison's stories will no doubt have appeal. Mary Carroll

Mattison's clever "intersecting" story collection reminds us that John Guare's famed six degrees of separation fall wide of the mark?it's two or three degrees at most. The characters in this badly titled work (the worst thing about it) live interwoven lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with the troubled figure of juvenile delinquent Denny Ring popping up in most stories. As lover, friend, grandson, employee, and menacing con artist, Denny profoundly affects men and women, young and old, while revealing less and less of himself. Is he angel or demon? The multiple viewpoints add depth and complexity to the characters, and at least two readings are needed to appreciate the nuances of Mattison's tight prose. A poet (Animals, 1979) and novelist (Hilda & Pearl, Morrow, 1995), Mattison published several of these stories in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, and the New England Review. She's someone to watch and, most certainly, to read. Highly recommended.?Jo Manning, Miami Beach, Fla.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688151094
• ISBN 13: 9780688151096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224