The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake - Softcover

Rust, Elissa Minor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804010781 ISBN 13: 9780804010788

Publisher: Swallow Press, 2005

Synopsis

The twelve stories in The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake take place in an affluent suburb of Portland, Oregon, but they could be taken from any number of similar enclaves across the United States. These stories infuse stark reality with occasional hints of magical realism to explore what the American dream means to twenty-first-century suburbanites. In a city where the homecoming queen still makes the front page of the weekly newspaper, ducks caught in storm drains and stolen campaign signs make up the bulk of the paper's crime reports. The community's hidden complexities, however, rival those of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

Each of the stories begins with an entry from the newspaper's police blotter. Elissa Minor Rust fills in the background to these small, odd events-a headless parakeet found in a mailbox, a nude jogger, an alarmingly deathlike discarded teddy bear. Her stories, both humorous and disturbing, probe beneath the clear, hard surface of a community into the murky depths beneath.

The lake at the center of town is a constant in the lives of this town’s people, and it reappears throughout the book as a symbol of wealth and power, of love and loss. The Prisoner Pear offers a rare look inside the heart of suburban America. Reading these stories is, as one character observes, “like seeing the town from the inside out, as if the lake was its heart and the rest merely its bones and skin.”

About this title

About the Author:

Elissa Minor Rust has published fiction in Baltimore Review, Orchid: A Literary Review, Beacon Street Review, and Honolulu Magazine, among others. She lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

From Publishers Weekly:

In 12 efficient, accomplished stories inspired by snippets from the Lake Oswego, Ore., police blotter, Rust takes a magnifying glass to affluent suburban life in the Pacific Northwest. In the title story, a young UPS manager looks for signs that he should propose to his rich girlfriend while battling a case of cold feet and class anxiety. A blotter item about two high school girls thought to be prostitutes (in fact, they're just standing on a corner, waiting for a cab) blossoms into a perceptive and moving story about best friends united—and ultimately divided—by their severe eating disorders. Economics drive a young father to enroll himself in risky medical experiments in "Rich Girls"; in "Of All the Insatiable Human Urges," a 36-year-old woman discovers she's pregnant shortly after learning that her 49-year-old husband is dying of prostate cancer; and in "Moon over Water," an unnatural sequence of full moons wreaks havoc in the Portland area. Solid, believable characters rendered in careful, deliberate prose move against a convincing landscape of lakeside cottages and sprawling McMansions, grocery store aisles and shopping malls, bedrooms and doctors' offices. This is a fine portrait of privileged lives, in all their mundanity and weirdness. (Dec.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0804010781
• ISBN 13: 9780804010788
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 193