Short-story master Bausch (Someone to Watch Over Me, 1999, etc.)
probes the tensions that seethe in families and marriages in three
novellas, one previously unpublished. "Requisite Kindness," the new
work, seems at first to cover the familiar territory of men who
screw up and women who are tired of picking up after them, which is
interesting enough, especially since Bausch's dialogue and
character insights are as cogent as ever. But the tale deepens as
it moves into the head of a man tending his dying mother, exploring
his fears and regrets over a failed marriage and damaged children.
The mother's passing is treated with a sad tenderness quite
different from the cold finality of a suicide that drives the
narrative in "Rare & Endangered Species," deservedly well-known
as the title piece in a 1994 collection. As Bausch explores the
fraught lives of Andrea Brewer's husband, children, and various
people more loosely linked to her suicide, we see couples trying to
reach each other across an abyss of guilt, anger, and shame: when
one husband tries to stop an argument by saying "I love you," his
wife snaps, "You use that like a club." Yet the tale expresses hope
too, especially in its closing with the birth of the granddaughter
Andrea will never see. "Spirits," from a 1987 collection by the
same title, also swerves to a cautiously happy ending after delving
into a young English professor's thoroughly nasty experiences while
apartment-sitting for an older faculty member with a weakness for
drink and vulnerable young women. At the same time, the young man's
former landlady is fundamentally unnerved by the discovery, all
over the local TV news, that her ex-husband is a serial killer of
little girls. "You think you understand a man's spirit when you
look in his eyes and he's your live-in partner for three years,"
she shudders-but she didn't, and in Bausch's world most people are
strangers even to those they love best. A bleak vision, tempered by
sensitive affection for human beings in all their frailty. (Kirkus
Reviews)
"Wives & Lovers" is a collection of three short novels from
the author whom the "Boston Globe" calls "one of the most expert
and substantial of our writers."
"Requisite Kindness" -- published here for the first time --
tells the story of a man who must come to terms with a life of
treating women badly when he goes to live with his sister and dying
mother. "Rare & Endangered Species" demonstrates how a wife and
mother's suicide reverberates in the small community where she
lived, and affects the lives of people who don't even know her.
Finally, "Spirits" is about the pain that men and women can -- and
do -- inflict upon each other. These three very different works
illuminate the unadorned core of love -- not the showy, more
celebrated sort but what remains when lust, jealousy, and passion
have been stripped away.
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