Come to Me. - book reviews

As some Roman said about all Gaul, all book reviews should be divided into three parts.

Point One: Inside every short story writer there must be a novelist trying desperately to get out. Five of the 12 stories in Amy Bloom's first collection concern a specific pair of suburban American couples: their infidelities, children, horrors, coping strategies and moments of eerie transcendence. Why would one not spin such stories out into a fully fashioned novel instead of enisling them as the overgrown center of a slim book of slim tales? Is the novel too risky? Too constraining? Too passe? Too much? One might hazard a media analogy suggesting that novels are to movies as short stories are to television: that is, that the large palette of the silver screen is one thing but the idiotly boxed sitcom or drama is another, and less intimidating, thing indeed. Amy Bloom is certainly not alone in such a choice, of course, but when Faulkner, say, has Snopeses turning up all over the place or when Marlow keeps showing up in Conrad's stories we do not have the feeling that something thematic is being hinted or, worse yet, avoided. But reading contemporary short stories such as these can produce a feeling of something having been abandoned stillborn, something not worked through for some reason. Perhaps in our postmodern times writers might see the novel as too assertive, too much the ego trip, too consuming or too exhausting for both writer and reader, too obviously commercial, too obviously cinematic, too much the bludgeon rather than the insightful petitpoint of the short story. James Michener or Tom Clancy or even Solzhenitsyn or Susan Sontag hardly qualify as neurasthenic parsers of life's little declensions.

Point Two: Inside every fiction writer there must be a psychologist trying desperately to get out. The novel's importance to this century has been inevitably tied to the century's equal fixation on psychology. Where would the novel be without Freud? This is the second thing to bring up about Amy Bloom's book. She is, after all, a psychotherapist herself and these stories have a great deal in common with case studies. Each addresses, almost without apology, a pathology. We start with a menage a trois, move on to incest, adultery, schizophrenia, transvestism, pedophilia, a May-December marriage, and end with a story called "Psychoanalysis Changed My Life." We're surprised the stories don't come each in its manila filefolder, complete with EEG's, blood samples, and patient histories. It's impressive but we should not forget that, in his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, the big guy warned, "The dialogue which constitutes the analysis will admit no audience; the process cannot be demonstrated." If he was right we'll have to disqualify a startling number of seminal texts from our reading lists. Freud's disclaimer shows perhaps too little faith in modern narrative's ability to contort time, causation, and whatever else it has contorted or, perhaps, too little faith in narrative itself; in this, ironically and perhaps significantly, he is right in line with contemporary feminist aesthetics, much to the chagrin, perhaps, of contemporary feminist aestheticians.

Point Three: Inside every psychologically involved fiction writer there must be a phantom autobiographer trying desperately to remain in. Amy Bloom likes to write in the first person (seven of the 12 stories), from the female (and exclusively youthful) point of view (10 of the 12 stories) and in the past tense (again, 10 of the 12 stories), but she parcels them out very cleverly in the design of her book. The only first-person male narrator is a small boy who accidentally shoots his cousin (we continue his story in two others, one from the point of view of his wife and the other his daughter); the only other male consciousness (third-person) is a rather randy construction company owner intent on adultery. His story too is bolstered (?), corrected (?), counterbalanced (?) by two from the female perspective. "Write about what you know" is certainly a bromide Bloom has taken to heart. And the heart is her constant milieu: eight of the stories end with a two-person tableau vivid with emotion, three with a person alone in bed learning to bear trauma, and one with a funeral. The only thing left to say about this point is that none of her characters are writers, though several have something to do with music, specifically the piano.

Come to Me was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction for 1993.

DANIEL MCGUINESS Loyola College in Maryland

COPYRIGHT 1994 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group