A GLIMPSE OF SCARLET; And Other Stories

The domestic triumphs and failures of America's Old Money and the trials of their second families--former spouses and stepchildren--are exposed behind the glitzy exterior

The privileged, polished world of the WASP upper-middle class serves as the backdrop for Robinson's ( Summer Light ) finely crafted and subtly powerful short stories. Behind the refined facade of her protagonists' lives, there exist intricate family machinery and delicate emotions. Ranging in their characterizations from a suburban mother who worries about stifling her daughter to a publishing executive who assesses the damage of a disorienting affair, to a man who must finally confront the pain of his distant father's second marriage, many of the 12 stories here are about dysfunctional families, with problems that are far from rare in American society. Concentrating on insignificant, everyday moments, Robinson exposes the gossamer threads that link families in a world of casual plenty. She shows a special understanding of the suffering and, sometimes, joy that goes into generating a new family dynamic after divorce. Many characters face personal crisis when a key relationship--filial, marital or within a friendship--enters a state of flux; and they experience revelation. Robinson's prose is as lucid and assured as her characters' socially correct demeanors, but its undercurrent of emotional urgency is what engages the reader. She is clearly a writer to be watched.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fourteen finely wrought and revealing stories about the not- so-gentle sting of WASP-y love, from novelist (Summer Light) and biographer (Georgia O'Keeffe) Robinson. In ``The Time for Kissing,'' a grown daughter, Susannah, sorts through images from her past in an effort to come to some sort of understanding with her willfully remote mother. Just as Susannah is ready to risk it--to try to cross old barricades of correctness-- her mother manages to rebuff her in a final, and desperately sad, fashion. ``Second Chances'' deals with the permutations and complications of trying to arrange a Thanksgiving dinner in a family of second marriages where there are stepchildren and in- laws, and where all the connections seem fragile and too-strong at the same time. In ``Tears Before Bedtime,'' a woman caught in the downward spiral of a bitter marriage uses a witty public argument at a dinner party to decimate her husband--but later at home, in a moving moment of truth, has to face up to his side of things. These stories all involve people of privilege: servants are part of the background; vacation houses and trips to Europe come with the territory. Robinson is wonderfully adept at conveying the code of this world. Unpleasant things--pain, blackmail, infidelity--are masked by convention, by chitchat, by small, polite smiles. In ``Graduation,'' a woman attending her son's boarding-school graduation has to deal with the dreaded prospect of meeting up with her ex-husband, an angry man who hasn't spoken to her in years. She carries it off and believes that everything has gone well--until she understands that she's been betrayed, deeply betrayed, in a way she'll never forget. There are strong moments of self-revelation in many of these pieces, including the title story, as well as ``Daughter'' and ``Friendship in a Foreign Country.'' Once more, Robinson demonstrates that she can take well-used New Yorker-ish themes and give them a whole new shine. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

These stories of upper-middle-class family life concern relationships between men and women, mistrust and infidelities, broken families, and stepparents and stepchildren. With characteristic delicacy and empathy, Robinson probes the terrible emotional constrictions her characters suffer in such stories as "Handicapped," "The Time for Kissing," and "Tears Before Bedtime." Other stories trace the complexities of friendship and forgiveness and the devotion and resignation of old age. In the title story, a suspicious wife makes much of her husband's casual lunch date, recalling her own affair and that of a couple seen by chance on the street--in "a moment of widening freedom, possibility" implied merely by "a glimpse of scarlet" in the woman's scarf or sleeve. Robinson's stories have been published in The New Yorker , Atlantic , and Southern Review . She is also the author of the novel Summer Light ( LJ 6/1/88) and Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life ( LJ 9/15/89). A touchingly intimate, human collection.
-Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.