Here: Stories - Hardcover

Inness-Brown, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807118486 ISBN 13: 9780807118481

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 1994

Synopsis

In these fourteen stories of growing up, hanging on, and getting old, Elizabeth Inness-Brown maps a territory of loneliness and love. Here is the sanctuary of the solitary mind, the land to which the unwanted exile themselves, the place to which we all retreat when life becomes too hot to touch. With wit, affection, and finesse, this collection shows us the dark side of our moon, the unfamiliar side that we nonetheless recognize as soon as we see it.
Under the sensual and sometimes fanciful surface of these fourteen stories lurks a dark reality: what any of us will do, desperate for love. But within the reality gleams a kind of measured transcendence, the kind of reclaimed innocence and balance that come only from accepting things as they truly are.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Inness-Brown teaches writing at St. Michael's College.

Reviews

Perspectives often shift in this second collection (after Satin Palms) of 14 stories, many of which portray the lives people lead once their idealism is gone. The female narrators of "Stephen" and "Really Love Him" take contrasting views of brief affairs, but both are realists who long ago discovered what they can expect from life. "Happy Father's Day" depicts a middle-aged man's relationship with his dying father as a prelude to the one he forges years later with his own grown children. "Addison," on the other hand, chronicles a life devoid of close ties yet filled with sexual encounters and self-delusions that fall away only after the death of an acquaintance. The collection's standout is "Traveler," a truly scary tale in which the narrator pretends to be the woman she thinks she's been mistaken for, only to discover that the joke is on her; once she reaches that recognition, the tension--accompanied by intimations of violence--never lets up. Ranging from frightening to strange to poignant, Inness-Brown's work powerfully prompts us to examine where we've been and where we're going.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Inness-Brown debuts with stories that seem to be pecking and tapping to hatch from the confining egg of practice exercises. Early pieces tend toward the awkward, as in ``Territory,'' about a weak-charactered traveling salesman in a failing marriage: people pose and soliloquize in unnatural ways to deepen the theme and move the story. ``Stephen,'' on the other hand, gives the knots-on-a-string impression of a story drawn, say, from diaries--a young couple goes on a long trip together, then the man goes off with another girl, then the prose stops. More often, though, pieces have a kind of conscientious but pedestrian earnestness suggesting that they needed an ``idea'' before coming into existence, instead of the other way around--as in ``Sleepwalker'' (a couple moves out of a new condo after the husband sleepwalks), ``The Surgeon'' (a doctor's wife dies of cancer), ``The Housesitter'' (a graduate student begins to acquire the temperament and personality of the people he housesits for), or ``Traveler'' (a woman is approached by men who claim to know her--and she goes along with it). When the author forgets about the ``story'' and simply puts her raw materials into the unprogramatic fiction-furnace, the results begin to enliven and achieve an atmosphere that contains drama--as in ``Life in the Tropics,'' about a young woman who lives in a city, in a large house, in summer, and waits for her lover. Small-town flavor … la Sherwood Anderson is evoked when a math professor's habits are slightly changed by a waitress's death (``Addison''); ``The Chef's Bride'' is a hyperconventional narrative about a Greek immigrant girl who is roughly seduced and then dies in ambiguous circumstances; and ``Happy Father's Day'' is a nostalgic maunder through two generations of a family's summer house in Maine. Short fiction of an emerging polish, varyingly arresting. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The narrators of these stories are observant, sane--they speak in voices that could be our own. But something is off-kilter in the situations they describe. For example, in "The Housesitter," an academic's facility for adopting the habits of others and blending effortlessly with his environment leads to a Kafkaesque transformation and a total loss of personal identity. One of the most disturbing stories is "The Sound," in which a couple embarks on an "odd holiday" to cure their ailing marriage. They stay at a resort, pretending to be brother and sister and having secret trysts. The woman becomes obsessed with a phenomenon that draws the attention of the other hotel guests on most mornings. She sees them from her window, looking at the lake and gesturing toward the water, but try as she might, she can never quite catch the event in progress and learn what it is that attracts them. Nor can anybody tell her what they have seen; they seem not to know what she is talking about. She and her husband hire a local who promises to show "it" to them, but find that they have been misled. Ultimately, the only kind of reality in these stories is psychological. They are powerful and absorbing, unsettling and slightly surreal. Anne Gendler

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807118486
• ISBN 13: 9780807118481
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120