Book Reviews

TYPICAL GIRLS: NEW STORIES BY SMART WOMEN

Edited by Susan Corrigan

For as long as she can remember, Harriet has been living on a space station with Bill, not really doing a whole lot except for playing games of I Spy, twiddling her thumbs, and watching the Earth from a distance. It's not a bad life (maybe a little lonely), but things take a turn for the worse when they notice the emergence of an extra sun that burns the Earth to a crisp, leaving these space voyagers stranded in outer orbit, suddenly the last human beings in existence anywhere.

Sounds like your typical sci-fi schlock? Well, guess again, because nothing in this collection of short stories Typical Girls is run-of-the mill. In "The Immortals," by Jenny Ross, science fiction quickly turns to dark comedy porn when two cryogenic chambers float into the space station. One chamber contains adult film star Lilith L'Amour and the other Star Trek fanatic Brad Hammer. Bill and Harriet figure that with the Earth being exploded and all, why not unfreeze the strangers and have a go at them? Lilith and Bill get down to business, but Brad Hammer is so depressed when he finds out Star Trek: The Next Generation was cancelled halfway through the 21st century that the only thing that cheers him up is violent rounds of masturbation and the consumption of nothing but his own sperm. Poor Harriet. It just goes to show you that even when you're one of only two women left in the world, it's still hard to get lucky.

Emily Perkins' "The Incredible Hulk" explores the saga of the caring, sensitive, and obese Maxine who wants nothing more in her life than to have a best friend.

Far from the ordinary pity-parties we've grown so used to seeing on daytime talk shows, this story shows the anguish of being fat while at the same time making us laugh. And the happy ending doesn't happen when Maxine vanquishes her eating problems and becomes thin and beautiful, but rather when she sits down in front of the TV with a plate of nachos and learns to like herself just the way she is.

Tracey Emin's "Albert Bert and Andy" is an eerie story of a child who plays with homeless men on the roof of an abandoned hotel. Their midnight games are luminous and dreamy, pulling you into a world where everything glows silver with the magic only children can create with make-believe fantasy. Even when you discover the brutality, blood, and exploitation of this game playing, which you've suspected all along, your reaction isn't the typical horror you might expect from a story about a child being abused.

The beauty of Typical Girls lies in the way you encounter situations you've read about a million times (people living in space, overeating, having sex, being abused) and see these human experiences with new eyes. This is a scary, funny, sexy collection of stories, and not one of them is like anything you've read before. A-
--Cecilia Johnson

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

By Davis Grubb

I'll wait until the movie comes out." It's not just a stock line for an illiterate buffoon. With a book like The Night of the Hunter, it's not a bad idea. One of the few convincing points in Davis Grubb's novel is inadvertent: mediocre novels make the best movies.

Published in 1953, and in made into a spectacular 1955 film featuring one of Robert Mitchum's finest performances and Charles Laughton's only turn as a director, Hunter--the book-- aspires to be Faulkneresque pastoral and a suspenseful, psychological thriller. While Grubb writes convincingly from a child's perspective, an especially difficult task, the best elements of the novel are so well adapted to film that it renders the book superfluous.

The story follows the travails of John and Pearl Harper, whose father, Ben, has been hanged for murders during a bank robbery. The Depression has hit West Virginia and times are hard. Ben Harper was able to stash the $10,000 in Pearl's doll and swear his children to secrecy, especially from their easy mark of a mother, Willa.

And who better than The Preacher, a.k.a. Harry Powell, to share Ben's cell during the condemned man's final months? The Preacher, a homicidal misogynist with a direct line to the Almighty Lord and a new widow to court.

"He would pay his money and go into the burlesque show and sit in the front row watching it all and rub the knife in his pocket with his sweating fingers; seething in a quiet convulsion of outrage and nausea at all that ocean of undulating womanhood beyond the lights."

The Preacher uses his tattooed hands (left fingers, H-A-T-E, right fingers, L-O-V-E) to tell "the tale of Good and Evil." Using a switchblade, he dispatches widows and prostitutes for fun and profit. "Don't touch it! Now, don't touch my knife! That makes me mad! Very, very mad!"

Freud runs as steady and deep as the Ohio River in this story. John's dreams, his repressed traumatic memories, and most of the other characters read like psychoanalytic case studies. Grubb, a native of the "bottomlands" of West Virginia, is both self conscious of and endeared to his roots. The novel struggles, like the vying hands of The Preacher, between Grubb's sense of country wisdom and his acquired literary and intellectual sensibilities.

Once mother Willa is murdered, John and Pearl drift down the Ohio in their father's skiff with The Preacher in pursuit. The children run aground and are taken in by kindly spinster Rachel Cooper. They churn butter and gather berries until The Preacher tracks them down and lays siege for a doll full of money.

The Night of the Hunter has an adequate plot, attention to imagery and amusing dialogue. However, there is only one compelling character --The Preacher-- throughout the entire book. Grubb is no Faulkner. Then again, Faulkner novels are too good, and therefore no good, for movies. Grubb should be remembered for writing the Great American Source Material. C
--Andrew Wells

BIRDS OF AMERICA

by Lorrie Moore

She's always been a master of humor, but with this collection of short stories, Lorrie Moore branches out into sentimentality, deepening her stories with the pangs of loss, fear, lonliness, and death. The most talked-about story in Birds has to be "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peek Onk," which was originally published in The New Yorker. With characters named Mother, Husband, and Baby, "People Like That" examines the trial of cancer (a baby with cancer!) so intimately and touchingly that many people assumed Moore was going through the trial herself, that the story was autobiographical. It wasn't, but therein lies the strength of her writing, her ability to fuse wit with fear in a way that's so true and so feminine readers can't helped but be bowled over.

"Willing" (about a movie starlet passing her prime), "Beautiful Grade" (about a second-tier professor getting it on with an ex-student), and "Terrific Mother" (about slapstick baby death) are all gems. A
--Chris J. Magyar