Beautiful young Englishwomen and the men who disappoint them
populate this tart and bitter debut collection by a former model
and Vogue staff writer living in London - winner of the Somerset
Maugham Award. "I lay on the bed looking over my shoulder through a
tangle of hair, aortas my dipping breast down to thighs like swan's
wings. I felt electric and wanted him to look at me. But he slept
within seconds." Much is expected of the men in Simpson's stories
and next to nothing is received as a succession of young women
living in both ancient and modern England fume over their martyrdom
at the hands of love. In "Zoe and the Pedagogues," a self-effacing
student sullenly tolerates her professor lover's habit of treating
her as a kind of pet; in "The Bed," a depressed secretary risks
enraging her drab young cohabiter by buying a magnificent new bed;
in "Good Friday, 1663," a 17th-century teenager dissects the
hateful qualities of her new, much older husband while waiting to
give birth to another man's child. In Simpson's world, sex is seen
as a despicable business transaction ("Are you sure your friend Jim
values you at your true worth?" a wealthy wife asks her younger
neighbor in "A Shining Example" shortly before she makes a pass at
her) or as a self-imposed form of solitary confinement ("I don't
know what he thinks about," the narrator says of her husband in the
title story. "'If only he could talk,' as old people say of their
pets"), and men can be counted on to lie, steal, disappear after a
single night or, worse, remain to prove themselves unutterably
dull. Pessimistic images (the vacationing heroine of "The Seafarer"
unpacks her clothes into "a wardrobe no bigger than a coffin") and
dreary settings accumulate until the fate of the final,
quasi-Kafkaesque story's heroine - death by hanging - comes as
absolutely no surprise. "Don't be morbid," snaps the condemned
woman's mother shortly before the book's abrupt conclusion. Sound
advice, too late. Simpson's talent should improve with age. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Brilliant, funny and tragic, Four Bare Legs in a Bed is an
outstanding and invigorating collection of short stories. In
Simpson's singular and opulent voice, we hear of the mixed
blessings of independence and marriage, of sex and babies. From a
bed that transforms the lives of a struggling couple to a chorus of
midwives telling the dramatic story of a birth, this is a playful,
unique set of stories to treasure.
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