This outstanding second collection offers a series of short stories
united by the common characters that inhabit a bleak Wisconsin
landscape. In each of these eight tales, Monroe (The Source of
Trouble, 1990) explores the many faces of love in rough and
passionate, but also often oddly distant, terms. It's as if the
hopelessness of a small town (with a population of 2,493, ten bars
on two blocks of Main Street, and a high-school graduating class of
29) seeps into every relationship. Monroe handles unrequited love
with just the right blend of sentimentality (to make it convincing)
and dry wit (to make it palatable). In "The World's Great Love
Novels," a young girl named Louisa recalls a life-altering summer
at her family's cabin on Sunfish Lake, where she meets a girl named
Zoe ("a year older than me, eighth grade: already a vamp....She'd
peaked early") and falls hard for a guy named Brad; but even though
Louisa and Brad never get together, years later, she admits that
she still dreams about him. A college-age Louisa then gets her
chance to generate longing in someone else when a man tries to win
her away from her abusive, dope-dealing boyfriend and fails ("The
Plow Got Through, Too Bad"). But sometimes, love proves possible,
as when a middle-age Zoe, trapped in an empty marriage, elicits a
passionate proposal from a man with whom she's been having what
seemed to be a purely physical affair ("Plumb and Solid"). What
makes all this romantic talk wash is that it's rarely romantic. The
characters may want to believe in true love, but we see them learn
to doubt that notion early on (Louisa knows the exact day her
parents' marriage "went terminal"), and the largely female cast
carry endlessly fascinating chips on their shoulders ("I understood
sex? No. I didn't drive a car either. I had rage. This got me
places"). Even when cold, these characters are hopelessly charming.
(Kirkus Reviews)
In the lavishly acclaimed collection of short stories A Wild, Cold
State, Flannery O'Connor Award -- winning author Debra Monroe takes
us into the lives of women striving for love and emotional
fulfillment amidst a forbidding topography of glacial winds and
stormY, unpredictable men.
Set in rural Wisconsin, these interwoven tales run a gamut of
moods and textures, ranging from the warmly nostalgic "The World's
Great Love Novels, " in which the young narrator observes the
extreme compromises adults make in the name of love, to the
hard-edged and gritty "Crossroads Cafe, " in which a waitress
searches for tenderness, though nothing in her life so far suggests
that tenderness is available.
Rendered in a spare and poetic style and marked by a nuanced
grasp of relationships and the vagaries of desire, the stories in A
Wild, Cold State offer a familiar and resonant portrayal of the
complexities of everyday life and the fundamental human need for
connection.
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