Most helpful customer reviews
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2.0 out of 5 stars
disappointed, Jul 15 2004
Like many, I was impressed by the stream of positive reviews for this book, especially for a first-time author. The reviews on Amazon seemed to concur with the general opinion that this collection was a major work by a talented new author. I found that the reviews were at best, hyperbole, and at worst, blatant hype. On close reading of the reviews a tone emerges that I feel is one of the secrets to this author's success: the reviews are as not just congratulatory, they are self-congratulatory. We want to like these stories to affirm that we are sensitive individuals, unafraid to peer into the darker corners of human experience. While I think such affirmation is a wonderful thing, I don't read fiction to get it.
The stories could be described in detail but it is far simpler, and no less accurate, to say that they revolve around the themes of death (often violent or due to suicide), homosexuality, and mental illness (almost always bipolar disorder or depression). In fact, it isn't possible to find a story in this collection that doesn't deal with at least two of the above themes, which I felt signified a phenomenal lack of imagination from a writer who had been lauded as this one has. If a character isn't anointed by the death of a parent/ a brush with mental illness/ thwarted homosexual longings they tend to be relegated to supporting roles of neighbours who interrupt dinner parties or shops teachers who dully float through their lives (these lives could be interesting too and you get the feeling Haslett knows it but just can't figure out what to do with them and so they are shuffled off-stage).
A writer has every right to choose the confines in which he feels must express himself but I thought these stories suffered from the constraints: I felt I was reading permutations of the same story over and over again. (Even proper names are recycled - Mrs. Giles in 'Devotion', a boy named Giles in 'Divination', minor quibbles but stuff that begins to wear on the reader). By the third story I was waiting for the author's obligatory other shoe to drop (so when does this character: put their head in the oven/ skip their medication so that the author can do his riff on a bipolar 'voice'/ look deeply into his classmates eyes...). I was never disappointed, which is to say I was greatly disappointed. I think the author should be praised for approaching 'difficult' subject matter and dealing with it in a way that attempts to give the characters dignity, but there are other ways of invoking sympathy than just the wake of death, there are other voices than that of the character who has skipped his Dapekote. If Haslett can express this, he hasn't shown it here, and he had plenty of opportunity.
But with several stories it becomes clear why Haslett spends so much time cruising the psychiatric manuals, he isn't particularly adept at dealing with emotions that don't arise from a pathologic situation or creating characters that are not wearing ready-made melodramatic yokes. When he attempts it, the result is a curious mixture: stock characters appear, improbable turns ensue.
An example is-hold your breath now-the heterosexual teenage boy in 'The Volunteer'. He is a virgin, of course, whose infatuation with a girl is annotated with every conceivable 'After School Special' cliché, who seeks advice about love and sex from a female psychiatric patient off her meds whose illness has estranged her from everyone except the voices in her head. His questions don't just pop up coincidentally in a conversation either, the character actually phones her up to ply her for insights. While it's true that the boy has few confidantes at home (his mother is, à la Haslett, in the throes of a depression) this interaction is as cloying as it is farfetched. In contrast to these ridiculous machinations, the troubled, orphaned boy in 'The Beginning of Grief' who becomes infatuated with a male classmate is given considerable psychological depth and complexity. As well, the female characters in this collection- from the elderly Scottish woman in 'War's End' to in Hillary in 'Devotion'- are little more than ciphers, used to introduce one injured male character to another or as a barrier between the male characters.
After reading 'Divination', a story where a young boy is able to foretell death (including that of his brother) you realize that you haven't just read a mediocre story, but a mediocre Steven King story aspiring to be a mediocre movie. There are some passages where the prose, unadorned for the most part, really impresses.
The last paragraph of 'Notes to my Biographer', the strongest story in the collection (bipoplar father: check, homosexual son: check), is especially beautiful and as good as you'll find in any collection. Often that type of beauty is enough, but I found it too rarely in this collection.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A master writer, Jun 9 2004
The spare, clean language of Haslett's book belies compassion behind his non-sentimentality. This is a rare gem and easily one of my 2 favorite books I read last year (along with Flanagan's "Gould's Book of Fish"). Haslett has exceptional talent and an ability to transcend the work of the people he admires (e.g. Munro). The perfection of his characterizations, the suspenseful tension of his storytelling, along with uncanny pacing are an inspiration to any writer. In the tradition of Capote, Kuralt and others, Haslett makes his finely honed language seem effortless (though I read he wrote full-time for 4 years to create this collection) and lets his unusual characters tell their stories. He's also done an exceptional job of creating non-cliched characters who none-the-less ring true. I'm envious! He's one of the finests writers I've read in ages.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
glossy and empty. fashionable, though., Mar 31 2004
I once read a review that used the description "beige-colored realism." That term came to mind immediately after I finished this collection. Haslett's prose is lifeless and flat, his characters self-absorbed and trite. You Are Not a Stranger Here is a perfect example of overly slick hyper-reality. All too often I finished a story and wondered what the point was. Certainly, the language is clean and technically sound, but conveyed no greater substance. Similarly, I consistantly found myself irritated by brick-like moments of artificial poignancy and banal epiphanies ("At last, she feels the warmth of her son's tears in the palms of her hands" and "For a moment, here, in the calm he knows is only the eye of the storm, in the center of a turbulance that, despite everything anyone has ever written or said, might not mean a thing, he can only stare into his friend's gentle face, and listen, with gratitude, to the sounds of the world around him."). Haslett's work exhibits the studied attention to style of a classic creative writing workshop student, but forgets somewhere along the way that the themes of grief and despair are broad and old, and must be handled with care (i.e. freshness and depth), and not treated like dead horses.
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