A novel by Joan Silber.
Currently reading.
This book is pissing me off. It feels like the author in the middle of a race-to-the-death literary competition where he had to churn out full-fold stories in the least amount of time possible. This jacket cover states " Intense in subject yet calm in tone.." Calm if you're an speed-freak and are looking for a mental fix to level yourself out.
The entire tone pushes you to the edge of your seat, not in suspense, but because your being hurled through the plot so fast and hard that you're sure you'll be hitting a grinding halt any minute. My heart aches and pushes against my chest, my throat clenches tighter and tighter as I felt I must be reaching a breaking point, something must happen and provide some relief from the nonstop push of sentences and words, images and actions, background and presence. All of these elements would be almost welcomed in a good suspense or thriller novel, but in a collection of short stories it feels like an unnecessary assault against the reader.
I'll not even go into the pathetic attempts to pull the stories together, forcing a binding tie that chokes off the readers intelligence and own sense on intuition.
written on July 12, 2004; modified on July 14, 2004.