The Complexities of Intimacy - Softcover

Caponegro, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891205 ISBN 13: 9781566891202

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2001

Synopsis

Dark, rich, rewarding stories that present the American family as a Heironymous Bosch painting.

The stories in The Complexities of Intimacy offer a surreal and darkly comedic exploration of that most complex of all institutions—the nuclear family. A breathtaking stylist, Mary Caponegro imbues her collection with startling details: a sister with an anatomical secret, a brother who invents a hammock from a harp, and precocious children who choose their own parents. Buoyed by her arch, Jamesian prose and psychological tone, Caponegro’s stories are as delicately intricate as the fragile and difficult relationships they describe.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Caponegro is the author of The Star Café, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down, among other collections of short fiction. Her stories have been anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Fiction, The Italian American Reader, and Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana. Born in Brooklyn, she has lived in Italy, and now resides in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she is currently the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard College and contributing editor of Conjunctions.

Reviews

At once visceral and cerebral, Caponegro's latest, aptly titled collection (after The Star Caf‚; Five Doubts) explores domesticity in a series of five stories that are likely to bewilder more readers than they will delight. The first story, "The Daughter's Lamentation," concerns a grown woman, formerly an aspiring ballerina, who looks after her elderly father and the once beautiful, now ramshackle home he lives in. Caponegro conjoins the deterioration of man and dwelling through dense, lyrical prose: "Octopus, I mispronounced that mesmerizing orifice, exchanging consonants, because it trapped him with its tentacles of light." "The Mother's Mirror" is a brief, meditative and dryly funny glimpse into the banality of family life. The narrator, an unappreciated and exhausted woman given to speaking in the first-person plural, wonders, "Why do we find ourself enraptured by the sonorous voice or elegant meaningless gestures of those we do not harbor in our homes?" The centerpiece of the collection and the strangest offering by far is the novella-length "The Son's Burden." Set in 1932 Chicago, it is narrated by Thomas Smalldrige, a would-be inventor obsessed with creating hybrid variations of the harp, the instrument his mother plays. Thomas's dismayed fianc‚e bears witness to the private antics of his brilliant but hilariously demented family, most notably his sister, Eleanor, who (with good reason, it turns out) exhibits a morbid fascination with physiological oddities. As in the other stories, the arch, archaic tone is disrupted by tantalizing flashes of innuendo and psychological menace. This daring book is definitely of the love-it-or-leave-it variety: like sea urchin or calf brains, Caponegro's style is an acquired taste that will thrill a small but enthusiastic audience. Author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566891205
• ISBN 13: 9781566891202
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 233