The Reasons I Won't Be Coming - Hardcover

Perlman, Elliot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573223212 ISBN 13: 9781573223218

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2005

Synopsis

A collection of nine short tales by the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity explores the complex worlds of such protagonists as lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers, in a volume that follows such themes as betrayal and lost opportunities. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Elliot Perlman was born in Australia. He is the author of the short-story collection The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, which won the Betty Trask Award (UK) and the Fellowship of Australian Writers Book of the Year Award. Riverhead Books will publish this collection in 2005.

Reviews

Elliot Perlman's new book, The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, isn't so much a collection of stories as a collection of narrators. Well, okay, it is a collection of stories, too -- there are nine here, some quite short, some novella-length -- but the voices are what make a lasting impression. Perlman, the Australian author of the much-praised behemoth Seven Types of Ambiguity, puts to use his experience as a barrister by placing the reader inside the minds of jurors, trial witnesses, a law professor and an employee with the Office of Probate, but the world of law is a subterfuge for the book's real subject: love gone sour. The voices that we are left with, sometimes as detached as a legal brief, are those of sorrowful ex-lovers (usually men) still sorting though the past, trying to figure out what the hell went wrong.

In "Good Morning, Again," the book's opener and one of its stronger entries, a middle-aged man carries on an internal monologue with his former lover even while he's in bed with a younger woman who's trying out older men. The narrator's observations are quirky but credible, as when he ruminates on the protocol of one-night stands after the young woman has drifted to sleep: "You have to feign at least a little surprise at being in this position with someone when you've never known them this way before. On the other hand, you have to behave as if you're under the influence of the other person's body with an insatiable hunger to know their soft and hidden parts, as though this person was the apotheosis of everyone you had ever lusted after." Internal monologue is used to good effect here, but it's so distinct that when Perlman employs it in three more stories, he risks monotony.

"In the Time of the Dinosaurs," the most successful story, is unlike the others in that the narrator is a child instead of a jilted or gloomy lover. Not that Perlman abandons his love-gone-sour theme: The young boy's attempts to impress his teacher with a science project on dinosaurs coincide with the dissolution of his parents' marriage. The boy, however, is never aware that his parents' marriage has gone south, making this a kind of detective story in which the boy consistently misinterprets the clues he's presented with. The details are perfect throughout: the dinosaur made out of beer cans; the much-coveted gold stars awarded to the best project; the chocolate-scented winds from the nearby factories.

In many of the stories, Perlman excels at creating tension. In "I Was Only in a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order," the story of an inept poet who wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, we learn early on that the narrator is unstable and that something terrible has probably happened. Perlman teases us with such sentences as "I am not well and I make no bones about it," but then holds off on the details of how he came to be institutionalized. Other times, the tension is created out of vagueness. "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine," the story of a retired law professor who has an affair with a married former student, begins, "A momentary loss of muscle control and now you don't speak." What, we wonder, does this mean? And so we read on.

My chief complaint with these stories is that their endings are more inevitable than surprising. The revelations aren't always as startling as we were led to believe, and so the stories read like domestic fiction written by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine" ends with a heavy-handed metaphor that ties together the meaning of the doctrine and its application to the two lovers. "Your Niece's Speech Night," the story of an interoffice romance, hinges on a plot contrivance that involves e-mail passwords. "The Reasons I Won't Be Coming," a marriage-at-a-crossroads story, pivots on the husband's misunderstanding of a conversation he and his wife had years earlier. The endings almost always feel forced, not organic.

The least successful story is "Manslaughter," a courtroom drama about a killer who is acquitted. The setting, the testimony, the drifting in and out of various points-of-view -- all of this creates a distance between the reader and the story's action. It's the reason I prefer watching Hitchcock's psychological thriller "Vertigo" to his courtroom drama "The Paradine Case." The former is intense, immediate and complex; the latter is static and dull.

At their best, these stories are like walking down the hallway of an old hotel and eavesdropping on sad confessions. It's hard not to be moved when the aging ex-professor of "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine" silently addresses the former student whom he has impregnated: "So now I sit here alone, while in your house you make grilled cheese on toast for your children, your husband watches television and inside you something of ours lives." These stories are love letters, really, and their protagonist, we come to learn, is none other than the human heart.

Reviewed by John McNally
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Perlman's bestseller Seven Types of Ambiguity was published in December of last year; this set of nine stories, first published in Perlman's native Australia in 2000, works the peripheries of similar territory and reads like a very successful set of outtakes and trial runs. The coldly luminous opener, "Good Morning, Again," perfectly captures the rueful, moment-by-moment disappointment of waking up after an empty liaison that follows an intense relationship. In "Manslaughter," Perlman, who is a barrister, uses a jury's own observations of one another to mercilessly send up the deliberative process (or decided lack thereof). The chirpy, inarticulate legalese a probate lawyer uses to voice his despair at the loss of his daughter (and then his wife) is rendered dead-on, as is the corporate-speak a spurned lover resorts to in a letter-never-sent–style monologue. A drawn-out story of a mad poet's minor redemption falls flat, as does a grotesque featuring a young, unloved student named Spitalnic, who literally has a hole in his heart. But "A Tale in Two Cities," the final novella charting the limits of Jewish emigré resilience, is Perlman in full: mystery, tight dialogue, layers of irony. At his best, Perlman makes false reasoning testify eloquently. (Dec. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Perlman follows his critically acclaimed novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2004), with a provocative collection of nine short stories that mine the depths of personal despair and societal angst in disarmingly direct, and often unpredictable, ways. From grieving parents to shady prosecutors, spurned lovers, and failed poets, Perlman's protagonists bare their souls, frequently through startling yet hauntingly recognizable interior, stream-of-consciousness dialogues that simultaneously reveal the tranquilizing fragility and frightening volatility inherent within conditional relationships. Themes of alienation and betrayal simmer tantalizingly throughout, occasionally bubbling over into gripping dramas such as "Your Niece's Speech Night" and "I Was Only in a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order." Without a doubt, the strongest of the entries is "A Tale in Two Cities," which follows the dissolution of a Russian family as they emigrate from Moscow to Melbourne. With astonishing acuity, Perlman cleverly distills momentous issues to their quintessential core as he explores the tenuous nature of rational behavior in the face of impending emotional upheaval. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573223212
• ISBN 13: 9781573223218
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288