Paris, Niagara Falls, Tokyo, Rochester, Norfolk, Istanbul: Where She Went's table of contents reads like an itinerary for a nervous breakdown. The mother and daughter narrators of these interlinked stories cover a lot of ground, but they never seem to get particularly far. A quote from the Elizabeth Bishop poem "Questions of Travel" sets the stage: "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?/Where should we be today?" Marion's travels are as a "company wife," packing and unpacking the same boxes in what comes to seem like the same house reproduced all over the globe. Marrying young to a man she scarcely knows, she's determined that her daughter will enjoy all the freedoms life has to offer, including and especially travel: "You must keep me abreast of everything, darling.... This is our world tour."

And Rebecca does, in a sense. The stories in the book's latter half revolve around a series of postcards, highly fictionalized snapshots of her travels that make it seem she's living out her mother's dream. Much like her mother, however, Rebecca voyages far and wide but gets nowhere. These are subtle, understated stories, domestic dioramas couched in luminous prose. Of the book's two halves, it's Marion's stories that are the more compelling, combining vivid evocations of place and time with a firm sense of character. Rebecca's stories feel less grounded--which is, presumably, the point. Still, they make for occasionally disorienting reading, with long stretches of stunning imagery in seeming free fall. But it's hard not to find yourself beguiled by Kate Walbert's prose, with its richly textured surfaces and sinuous rhythms. As a debut collection, Where She Went promises great things for where she will go.

From Publishers Weekly

Moving through a series of slow-motion vignettes, Walbert's meticulous, unshakably sad collection of linked stories provides glimpses into the lives of two women: one condemned by her husband's career to wander from one middle-sized American city to another; the other her daughter, who takes a series of European vacations in the doomed hope of living up to her mother's dreams of fun and romance. Trapped in a conventional, 36-year-old marriage, "hollowed out" by depression after the cradle death of her second child, passionate Marion Clark imagines a world of glamour through the postcards and letters of her first and only surviving child. The distinction between traveling for pleasure and traveling by necessity is analogous to other distinctions between the lives and opportunities of mother and daughter. As Marion once did, 30-something Rebecca goes to New York in search of love and success, but without the husband-hunting sense of purpose that guided so many working women of the 1950s. Aimless and melancholy compared to her mother, Rebecca glides from one lonely, lazy affair to another before drifting into marriage (she asks for a divorce on her honeymoon), wishing all the while that she could live up to her mother's expectations of the "adventurous" life. Sometimes these enigmatic stories are precious and overworked, straining toward a hush of despair. At their more frequent best, however, they resonate with surprising pathos, and these moments establish Walbert as one of the season's most promising, idiosyncratic new writers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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5.0�toiles sur 5 Beautiful writing., Juil 4 2001

Par	Frank Williams "frank3880" (Las Cruces, NM USA) - Voir tous mes commentaires

This review is from: Where She Went (Paperback)

No one writing today surpasses Kate Walbert in beauty of style. I think the 'editorial reviews' miss the point in judging the later stories in this volume. What they perceive as 'disjointed narrative' is actually a master painting emotions and events using an economy of brushstrokes in carefully interlaced fashion. Criticizing her for this technique reminds me of the academicians in Paris who couldn't comprehend the Impressionists. The story "1980 Florence" is a true masterpiece. I recommend Walbert heartily to any readers who want to experience the very best in contemporary writing.

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