| An American woman is caught between the solid husband she counts on never leaving, her five-year-old son, and an English boyfriend who is deter-minedly trespassing in her life: "Far down the street,seen from behind, with his worn Levi s, scuffedleather jacket, and close-cropped fair head, Briancould have been a rough American kid, even a gangmember. This was a London ideal, and an illusion hespent some effort perpetuating: as she ran after it, itcharmed her." Through four linked stories set in Lon-don, the theme of love chaste, evaded, mistrusted,or returned to--is pursued with a novella-like com-plexity. Complex, too, are the links among a secondset of stories, set in New Mexico ("After reading thebook s first quarter," the Los Angeles Times reviewerwrote of Elizabeth Tallent s Museum Pieces, "you couldfind your way around Santa Fe by moonlight"): acrumbled adobe house is renovated by a young hus-band, short on time yet long on generosity, who triesto please both his somewhat prickly (and newly preg-nant) wife and his miserly but truly needy Hispanicneighbor. Elizabeth Tallent s two previous books have estab-lished her reputation as an elegant, engaging writerwhose special territory is (in the words of MichikoKakutani in The New York Times) "the complicatedgeometry of emotions between men and women, par-ents and their children." In this, her second collectionof stories, we see her skills and emotional rangedeepen as she presents crucial episodes from a numberof very varied lives: His young wife s pregnancy dis-turbs a professor of mathematics, especially when sheturns for comfort in an entirely unexpected direction--to his ex-wife; an infatuated eighteen-year-old re-ceives a mysteriously affecting birthday gift from herolder, married lover, in a rendezvous set entirely in a pickup truck; under the frightened eyes of his father a son dives into the Rio Grande to try to rescue a pair of struggling canoeists; and, in a moment of crisis, a battered married woman seeks out the gentle high- school boyfriend she has ignored for years. Not only in the sweep of its settings, but also in its insight, seriousness, and wit, Time with Children is the strongest fiction yet fi-om a young writer whose work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Award Prize Stories, The Graywolf Short Story Annual, and the Pushcart Prize and Editor s Choice anthologies. |
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