When Things Get Back to Normal

In a tone at once comic, gothic, and deceptively pastoral, the stories in this collection continue the tradition of Hawthorne, Poe, and James—Americans pursuing a dialectic with Europe—but in a late 20th century context. Constance Pierce's character's, with their fetishes for food and property, hide their eyes with daydreams, hallucinations, and enormous feats of rationale in their longing to return to the happy normal state they tell themselves they once enjoys but which likely never existed at all. Subtly questioning their characters' illusions and nostalgia, these stories, set in such territory as World War II Germany, the French countryside, and Long Island Sound, address the often nebulous relationships between private and public life, old and new ideas, fantasy and reality.

The characters who inhabit this collection (a novella, five stories and two sketches) all seem to suffer from a similar malaise: they are social anomalies, and their 19th century sensibilities are unappreciated in today's world. In "The Tenants at Auxillac," the owner of a decaying chateaua pretentious "middle-aged orphan with no profession"is reduced to renting a cottage on his property to a young couple, whom he comes to detest. While suffering this indignity, he attempts to entertain, in grand style, an equally pretentious minor actress who has stopped off on her way to Cannes. In "Manosque," a dilettantish couple (supported by his annuity) flees '60s America for the South of France, where he studies Lorca and the classics in translation, and she wonders whether the light at the Cote d'Azur is the same as it was a century earlier. Never letting up on artiface or arch prose style (something akin to Henry James but with sexuality), Pierce's surprisingly comic exploration of human illusions is rendered with delicate grace.
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