Word: robison
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...troubles besetting the baby boom generation--soaring divorce rates, disintegration of the nuclear family, alcoholism, mental illness they point to warnings by psychiatrists and sociologists that the consequences of these trends will be "ominous" and "dire" for the children growing up-in these broken homes. And when Mary Robison is not teaching English C at Harvard, she has made it her business to flesh out those troubling statistics in carefully crafted vignettes of family dynamics; what would happen to Holden Caulfield today, if he were in his early twenties...
...Robison has been grouped with the bleak, minimalist school of New Yorker writers who have succeeded Updike, Cheever, and Salinger. Though Robison writes the occasional Salingeresque sentence ("One morning I was fixing cinammon toast of something and I had to practically he on the counter to keep from going into a complete faint") such puppyish exaggeration is rare. Like Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme, she casts a cold and detached eye on her characters, and tends to write spare prose about her spare people. People, what's more, who are distanced from their emotions. We see them the outside, largely...
...Robison's quirky usage also enlivens the stories unexpectedly perfect words pop up like Kleenex in the midst of an unremarkable description. We become reacquainted with the "nose" of a pencil, and the "dish rinser" that one uses to "spritz" the dinner plates. We need these sparks of craft because many of these thirteen stories are so brief as to be almost like SAT exercises in creative writing (write a scene between two or three closely related characters, starting in the middle. Be sure to include subtle details to establish time, place, and motivation. Stop after you have finished work...
...BEST of Robison's stories, the ones that remain in memory like "Coach" and "The Wellman Twins," present situations filled with incidental pleasures and characters who find purpose beyond the bare outlines of their lives. In "The Wellman Twins," the twins Bluey and Greer have shared a game since childhood, called "getting bold." It is supposed to be a private covenant for a session of secrets and truth-telling, but they use the opportunity to regale each other with outrageous lies--tall tales which gradually spiral down to a compact center of truth. Bluey has been writing letters...
...less hopeful story, "Smart," the main character says flatly: "It's just that people, they don't ever do what they don't want to do. And they can't ever be what they aren't already." But in "The Wellman Twins," Robison shows us a less determined reality, one that can be altered by the imagination perhaps. Bluey confesses at last that the letters...