James Mason and the Walk-In Closet (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) - Hardcover

Seese, June Akers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1564780406 ISBN 13: 9781564780409

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994

Synopsis

In this collection of short fiction - two novellas and eleven short stories - June Akers Seese writes of the Sylvia Plath generation: older women who, although alienated from conventional roles, remain unliberated by the feminist movement, and are thereby stranded in silent anguish between two worlds, belonging to neither. Her characters in this collection of urban tales include a teacher who sleeps with a rock star on her lunch break, a defrocked priest, a saxophone player who finds a Brillo pad in his scrambled eggs, a psychiatrist whose glasses fall off his nose, and a legal secretary still in love with her estranged homosexual husband. Though haunted by the past, these characters experience moments when the complexities of life are distilled into something immediate and illuminating. The style is tough but lyrical, wry but compassionate. The settings are invariably urban - Chicago, Detroit, Georgetown, Atlanta, Dublin - and she fills these cities with modern men and women we recognize and pity. Her hard themes of loss, hunger, and rage break finally into a rebellious acceptance that is her work's hallmark: its everyday heroism.

About this title

About the Author

Seese is the recipient of a Yaddo Writers' Fellowship. She has taught at Spelman College and Callanwolde Fine Arts Center.

From Kirkus Reviews

Stories quietly celebrating the insights that middle-aged women, born too early for today's big careers, salvage from the wreckage of their lives. By the author of Is This What Other Women Feel Too? (1991), etc. Seese's women, usually in their late 40s or early 50s, went to college but learned nothing that prepared them for the rest of their lives. ``I am a receptionist,'' announces the narrator of the title novella. ``Another girl who paid the price of reading what I wanted for four years.'' The women also tend to be Catholic, were raised in blue-collar neighborhoods, and left home as soon as they could. The novella's narrator recalls a past that has led to a life of constant travel and many disappointments, assuaged only by watching reruns of James Mason movies. She recalls a botched abortion; a love affair with an Irish student; a friend who murdered her cold and unloving mother; a recent winter in Dublin when she had an affair with a priest and worked for an American homosexual. In notable pieces like ``the Polish Girl and the Black Musician,'' ``Hildegarde's Long Gloves,'' and ``Ashtrays,'' respectively, a young Polish-American artist from Detroit marries a black musician from St. Louis so that she ``can leave this factory town,'' although her courage is only a mask for desperation; a middle-aged woman tells her childhood friend that ``life is not a fashion statement,'' and then recalls the white gloves she stole as a child because she wanted to be like Hildegarde, ``who wore white gloves and sang in a voice that made [her] shiver''; and a divorced woman (``forty, not long separated and smoking so much'') leaves San Francisco for North Carolina, though she's still in love with her homosexual husband. Slender stories that resonate with wisdom and a wry understanding of the familiar angst of middle age for lonely women. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1564780406
• ISBN 13: 9781564780409
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128