Synopsis
A collection of fourteen short stories includes tales of the well-born and those who serve them as they struggle to display their correctness to those beneath them in the world. A first collection.
Reviews
The dozen stories in this debut collection are told in arresting prose but have the quaint resonance of old-fashioned mantelpiece curios. Brittle, arch but oddly affecting narratives that offer disjointed insights about patrician lives, most are not so much stories as they are personality studies. Pyne has a unique style, however, that offers up such moments of brillance as this detail from "On the Great Lawn at Groton," on a fight between schoolboys: "The fast green ground whacks up into them, one time, two times, three times. . . . " At other moments, though, her language is distractingly strange (in the same story: "its smell-without-smelling smell of that place where handkerchiefs are relentlessly drawn from") But when she is good she is strikingly perceptive. "Switzerland" is a clever tale about a repressed schoolteacher's experience on a maiden voyage, and it is also the most linear. Pyne has staked out the territory of privilege and money, from Southampton to Jupiter Island, and she knows her subjects very well. There is a genuineness to the inner ramblings of characters who worry about the servants and the wine and shooting etiquette. But a highly refined skill of literary manipulation combined with rich material isn't enough. The book falls flat because, despite its self-conscious complexity, it lacks any real force and focus.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The sheer unfashionableness of Pyne's debut collection is an excitement. This is anything but standard-issue MFA stuff. She writes about the rich: organized quail-shoots, visits to country chateaus, family vacations at exclusive resorts. The knotty rendering of the stories is unapologetic: a Style. Barely a sentence goes by without a leap leapt, a risk taken, subjects playing peekaboo with predicates. The miasma of sensation negotiated by these characters of privilege harkens back to Henry Green's great, mysterious novel Party Going. But Pyne is hardly Green--yet. Exhilaration fades as you work into the book, as the prose mannerisms (largely borrowed, it seems, from Woolf, Stein, Harold Brodkey) close over your head and as the social portraiture disappears (and along with it any single person's voice except the sovereign one of the narration). Small things like giving or getting gifts or seating arrangements become the frameworks for a papier-mƒch‚ swaddle of choppy reiteration (``Where was it that he had just seen nubs, or had just been thinking of nubs? The father was wondering this. It was, yes! the nubs on a sweater; nubs such as, yes! were on that sweater, the sweater for ladies, the one that he had been fingering in Madrid, deciding, just yesterday, about buying. Or about not buying'') or baroque portentousness (``Victory is the tell-tale country to those who have not been there, I know that--the scene of a little stone throw that turns, with just the telling of it, into the dilation of a lake-sized orgasm''). The best things here are the more conventional, easily realized stories, usually interior monologues by solitary women--``Wind,'' ``Switzerland,'' ``The Dead Parts Only''--but Pyne will be an interesting writer to track as she goes on trying to bring into balance her penchant for literary decoration and an unmistakable talent for the gnostic moments that pepper lives lived among other lives. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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