Sweet Talk: Stories

A collection of short stories chronicles the life of a woman named Gemma, from her upbringing on American army bases in the shadow of her father's breakdown, to her adulthood, troubled by a dying love affair

"Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again." This arresting image opens "Dog Heaven," the final story in an accomplished first collection by a young writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker. Vaughn writes mainly in a wry, undistanced first-person voice, creating imaginative language for recognizable young women in varying circumstances and careers. The narrator of "We're on TV in the Universe" crashes into a patrol car in winter, looks up at the arriving policeman and sees "the crazed lights on the top of his car slinging snowfish around his head." In "The Architecture of California" a young wife comes to understand that her husband has made her best friend pregnant. A comparable unfaithfulness is at the heart of "Other Women," while "Snow Angel" tells of a young mother, trapped in the house with her two children during a three-day snowstorm, who manages--just--to keep her sanity and faith with her kids. Most powerful are the stories about Gemma, including "Kid MacArthur" and "Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog" in which Vaughn's clear-eyed, scalpel-sharp and affectionate observations of a distinctive childhood are delivered in graceful, honest prose.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Five of the ten stories in Vaughn's collection are memory stories of her family. Filled with ambient light, eloquent in content and execution, they are about Gemma, who tells us "I grew up in the army," and her officer father, who like Vaughn's was stationed with his family at various army posts in the United States and abroad. In these stories Vaughn counterpoints the innocence and egocentricity of childhood with the understanding of an adult looking backwards, finally grasping what was happening, finally understanding that though her father was a tall man who loomed large over her childhood he was a failure. Vaughn's family stories are interspersed with stories about a grown woman, presumably Gemma. These stories are very contemporary in their contemplation of the loss of love, of errors in judgment, of the randomness of life, but they lack the luminosity of the family stories.
- Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.