Word: klass
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...PRESS release on the collection of short stories by Perri Klass '79, I am Having an Adventure, says that Klass--a 1986 graduate of Harvard Medical School, a columnist for Discover and the mother of a two-year-old--"has discovered that writing short stories fits nicely around the edges of her life...
Would that Klass had lavished a little more artistic pretension on her fiction. Written at different times while Klass was a graduate student in zoology, doing field work in Central America, living in Rome and attending medical school, these stories document in theme--rather than form--a disenchantment with sameness. The thematic concerns are all the same. The stories all speak of restless students who are usually also relentless travelers. You get the feeling there are only a few real characters, chopped up and shooed into all the stories...
Another problem with the stories is that introspection constantly muddies the portrayal of all the rotting relationships of which Klass writes. In "In Africa" the lover complains that he doesn't know what his girlfriend did all the time she was in Africa. The man in "A Gift of Sweet Mustard" imagines that his unemployed wife is carrying on an affair while he is at work during the day. Their anxiety and its aftermath of malaise isn't necessary. They are either too empty-headed or devious in a way that the author has completely neglected to clarify...
THERE ARE SOME striking similarities between Klass' work and Ellen Gilchrist's Drunk with Love. Both document floundering relationships. Both authors create characters who are obsessed with appearances. Each collection includes a story about a diet. Klass' story, "The Secret Lives of Dieters," traces the disintegration of a relationship throughout a diet. Gilchrist's is bathetic. It opens with a report of the death of JeanAnne Lori Mayfield who ended the last diet she ever undertook by crashing into a doughnut shop, killing two people...
...World melodiously fleshes out the improbably festive-sounding trinity of titles of these contemporary short story collections: I Am Having an Adventure, Drunk with Love and Back in the World. This collection however doesn't commit itself to either the confused soul-searching that goes on in Klass' book or the heady hothouse passions that obscure some disturbing authorial attitudes in Drunk with Love...