Word: colwin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Four is a small banquet, but readers can choose for themselves how many stories they wish to return to, and the menu is certainly extensive. Established masters Updike, Carver, Wright Morris, and LeGuin are joined by rising talents like Laurie Colwin and Bobbie Ann Mason, as well as a host of freshman including, curiously, James Bond...
...that is so, then gossip (whatever its individual destructiveness, which can be awesome-ask Othello) also serves as a profound daily act of community. In her novel Happy All the Time, Laurie Colwin has a character who prefers to call gossip "emotional speculation." Right. Through the great daily bazaar of bitchiness (men can be just as bitchy as women) passes a dense and bewildering parade of follies. They involve sex and money and alcohol and children and jobs and cruelty and treachery...
FICTION: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera -A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone -The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Bowen - The Company of Women, Mary Gordon -Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson -The Lone Pilgrim, Laurie Colwin -Other People's Worlds, William Trevor
...other hand, the women who settle down with appropriate spouses are apt to find themselves committing adultery and worrying a great deal about it. Colwin on Polly, the heroine of Family Happiness: "Once she had divided the world into the sort of women who had love affairs and the sort of women who did not. But now she, a woman who did not, did, and with considerable expertise." In A Mythological Subject, a happily married woman begins an affair and torments herself with guilt and questions: "That she had fallen in love meant something. What did it say about herself...
...Colwin's characters take themselves more seriously than does their author. She presents their moral writhings as both ad mirable (acts have consequences) and funny (things do simply happen). She also knows that people who get what they want will inevitably want something else: "The lovely thing about marriage is that life ambles on-as if life were some mean dering path lined with sturdy plane trees. A love affair is like a shot arrow. It gives life an intense direction, if only for an in stant." Colwin's witty, graceful stories convey both leisurely walks and sudden...