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In this collection of 10 short stories, Michael Redhill, playwright and author of the acclaimed novel
Martin Sloane, explores the many faces of fidelity and infidelity among husbands and wives, lovers, children, parents. Writing gracefully, with dialogue that has the genuine feel of intimacy, Redhill analyzes the nature of desire and trust and the ways they can impinge on each other. In "Mount Morris," a photographer comes once a year to a small town to see his former wife. Unable to split for good, they persistently and painfully fall into old patterns, their love "more than a memory, but less than a presence: a tune they could still hum." In "The Flesh Collectors," Redhill places the humorous and the horrific in succeeding paragraphs, when Roth, without his wife's knowledge, attempts to make a deposit at a semen storage facility and accidentally turns on the television, which blasts out news of a disaster in Israel.
At times, Redhill's stories can disturb by what he leaves unsaid. In "The Victim, Who Cannot Be Named," the culminating violence of a 17-year-old girl's father is merely suggested but is all the more powerful for that, and the question of who is the real "victim" is left achingly ambiguous. Many of these stories feel unresolved on first reading, yet close attention reveals that solutions--or, at the least, directions--can be found in the text. These are well-wrought, human probings of love in all its pain, its struggles, and its failings. --Mark Frutkin
From Publishers Weekly
Heartbreak and betrayal run through Redhill's slim collection of muted but well-wrought stories examining the damage people inflict on themselves and others when their relationships fail. Redhill (Martin Sloane) gives his characters believable vulnerabilities and a touching humanity, even as they make messes of their lives: a traveling school-portrait photographer who visits his ex-wife each year tries but fails to tell her how things have changed; a father finds himself unable to cope with his teenage daughter's shocking sexual behavior; a young woman struggling with a rocky relationship doubts the very idea of connection to another person; and a Jewish man wrestles with the morality of banking his sperm before he has a vasectomy that will make intimacy with his wife easier. In one of the most affecting stories, "Long Division," a precocious child bears the burden of his parents' disenchantment with each other. Redhill's writing is graceful, so his stories of people who are "lonesome with people and without them" are moving without being maudlin. Most of the 10 tales contain a whopper of a flashback—a childhood memory that goes a long way toward explaining how the protagonist became the scarred adult he or she is—and while the device begins to feel overused, it's a small flaw in an otherwise quietly moving collection.
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--This text refers to the
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