The Curse of the Appropriate Man
Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A stunning and satisfying volume” of short stories about women and their relationships, from a winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize (Booklist).
This collection of short fiction deals with the struggles between mothers and their wayward daughters, the often preposterous bonds that tie men and women together, and the complex games masters and servants play with one another.
Whether describing a mother mired in senile dementia in “Ma,” a young girl’s loss of innocence with an itinerant knife-sharpener in “Under the House,” or a young woman incapable of conventional love in “An Error of Desire,” Lynn Freed portrays the absurdity, the delusions, the dramas, and the dignity of her characters’ lives.
“Women’s relationships—with their mothers, their lovers, their culture and their own sexuality—are the subject of the 14 stories in this fine collection. Freed . . . creates achingly real women and lovingly rendered misfits, and she reports straightforwardly and without judgment on their unconventional urges and questionable decisions.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Women's relationships with their mothers, their lovers, their culture and their own sexuality are the subject of the 14 stories (written over nearly 20 years) in this fine collection. Freed, the author of five novels (The Mirror; House of Women; etc.), creates achingly real women and lovingly rendered misfits, and she reports straightforwardly and without judgment on their unconventional urges and questionable decisions. "Under the House" recounts a young girl's first sexual encounter with a traveling knife sharpener in the crawl space under her house and her subsequent memories of what should have been a traumatic event for her but was in fact something much more ambiguous. "The Widow's Daughter" tells of a young woman, possibly abused as a child, discovering and then flaunting her sexual power, much to her mother's horror. In the affecting title story, a middle-aged woman ponders how "half a lifetime of appropriate men can leave a woman parched for adventure." She dates two eccentric men but, finding herself still longing for the exotic, travels to Asia. On her way back, she meets a friend who's taken the opposite tack, marrying for convenience ("Quite acceptable, once you get over the death of the heart"). A few of these stories are schematic in their briefness, but most are quietly devastating and deeply resonant.
