Dream State: Stories - Hardcover

Crone, Moira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0878058133 ISBN 13: 9780878058136

Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi, 1995

Synopsis

In the title story, which won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize in 1993, a beautiful and difficult movie star returns to her hometown after making a mess of her Hollywood life. In "There Is a River in New Orleans" a divorced woman is haunted by the memory of her mother, who was "the way Southern women were supposed to be - weak, hysterical, corrupt, ripe for slaps, Scarlett, Blanche, all that."
In "Oslo," first published in The New Yorker, newcomers to Louisiana, frightened by its lushness and strangeness, dream about being someplace else, Jerusalem or Oslo, while their love life disintegrates around them, just beyond their notice. In "Desire" a French Quarter photographer becomes obsessed with a rich Uptown married woman who was once his model, and is now his patroness. In "Crocheting" the narrator combats loss and grief by making a sky-blue cap for her mother, who is hospitalized and dying of cancer.
In "I Am Eleven" a woman recalls the year her brother, a high school football hero, had to marry a girl in a small Louisiana town. In "Fever" life suddenly changes for a perfectly happy married man with a beautiful baby and an ambitious wife when he is visited by Camille Hebert, a young Cajun singer with a fever of 103 degrees. And in "Gauguin," while Hurricane Andrew rages, a crusading environmental lawyer caught in Baton Rouge recalls the previous autumn when David Duke almost became governor.

About this title

About the Author

Moira Crone teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University.

Reviews

``Everybody is real [sic] the same. Not some more real and some less,'' observes the narrator of the title tale of this new collection of eight stories from Crone (The Winnebago Mysteries). This book, which won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize, concerns a declining movie star who returns to her Louisiana hometown to escape a scandal in Hollywood. Indeed, the strength of Crone's short fiction is the realism that the author grants to her characters and their situations: a divorced couple meeting over dinner in New Orleans to discuss their daughter's schooling, in the process reawakening tender feelings for each other (``There is a River in New Orleans''); an unemployed father of a baby girl who has an affair with a teenager while his wife is away on business (``Fever''). All the stories are set in Louisiana (Crone teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University), depicted as a culturally hybrid landscape where traditional rules collide with individual desires. The psychological aspects of most of the tales, generally voiced by forthcoming, self-reflective narrators, seem obvious. While readers may appreciate the accessibility and earnestness of the collection, they won't have to strain to figure out the kind of world Crone is creating for her characters: one marked by confusion about self, love and future.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0878058133
• ISBN 13: 9780878058136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 189