Brown's fourth (The Terrible Girls, 1992, etc.) mixes fantasy,
conjecture, and some realism in seven stories that feature
atmospheric neo-feminist allegories and fables. The two longest
pieces are the most striking: "Annie" (originally published in Adam
Mars-Jones's Mae West is Dead: Recent Lesbian & Gay Fiction) is
about the narrator's love affair with Annie Oakley - it's part
historical pastiche, part touching daydream, and part biting
satire. Juxtaposing the narrator's western daydreams with grittier
realism, Brown manages to force upon her narrator the kind of rude
awakening best displayed by Tim O'Brien in Going after Cacciato.
She also has a good deal of fun along the way: in one instance,
Annie Oakley signs autographs at Saks - "the release of her
authorized biography coincides with the arrival of the special line
of new fall fashions - Annie Oakley Western Wear." "A Good Man"
(which first appeared in Joan Nestle and Naomi Holoch's Women on
Women II) is a tribute to a decent man dying of AIDS, nursed off
and on by his lesbian friend; the striking "Folie a Deux" posits a
couple who deliberately cripple themselves - one deaf, one blind -
so that "Each of us had something the other didn't have"; and the
remaining four stories, published in Britain in 1984, are dreamlike
fables. In the best, "Love Poem," the narrator and "you," an artist
(the second person becomes a tic in several of these), sneak into
the Tate and destroy the artist's work; "The Joy of Marriage" is a
touching but ideological look at a honeymoon; "Grief" is about a
woman sent off by her clique to a foreign country - she never
returns. Occasionally moving, the story's too obliquely personal to
make enough sense to a wider audience. Imagistic, edgy fictions
about postmodern longing in a world off its screws - and where
sadness seems to be a woman's only fate. (Kirkus Reviews)
Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, The Gifts of
the Body, What Keeps Me Here, and The Dogs.
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