Rage in all its ugly glory takes center stage in this delectable
debut collection. The characters populating the landscape of these
nine stories exist mostly in a rarefied life of the mind-scholars,
teachers, reviewers, artists-until some crisis forces them to focus
their powers of observation on themselves. In "An Excitable Woman,"
an academic has no idea what to do about his spiteful mother, who
lives only for the pleasure of rejecting the approaches of her
"big-shot professor son." The protagonist of "Samantha," a black
student full of a "surging, corrosive indignation," is spoiling for
a fight with anyone at her predominantly white college-the
audio-visual department assistant, a minority affairs counselor,
the bookstore cashier-until a brief encounter with a professor
yields some surprises, not least of which is her own response. A
music aficionado, awed by a fellow audience member ("The Stranger")
who physically removes a whole row of disruptive teenagers from
their seats at a Tanglewood concert, begins to stalk the man until
he finds himself engaged in an even more violent act. In "The
Visit," an up-and-coming poetry critic meets Robert Lowell and his
wife, Lady Caroline, in their trashed bedroom at the Gramercy Hotel
in a set piece that is part Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, part
"Beavis and Butthead." In "Secrets and Sons," a magazine editor and
long-time friend to a dying poet is forced to come to terms with
his competitive hatred for the poet's uneducated gay ward when he
is upstaged at the funeral by voluminous evidence that he knew only
one small part of the man's life. Boyers's stories about academics
and art-lovers who hide their more ignoble characteristics until
life inevitably draws them out is exquisitely crafted and acutely
observed. Serving recommendation: One story per sitting. The book
may be savored longer that way. (Kirkus Reviews)
Fiction. These astonishing stories, which range in setting from
Palm Beach to Paris to poet Robert Lowell's New York City hotel
room, trace the designs and delusions of people at turning points
and souls in turmoil. Robert Boyers is Tisch Professor of Arts and
Letters at Skidmore College and editor of Salmagundi. He is the
author of seven books, including Atrocity and Amnesia: The
Political Novel Since 1945. He also won the Cooper Prize for the
best short story of the year, 2003. Recent stories have appeared in
The Yale Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, and Michigan Quarterly
Review.
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