Word: yarns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Imperials are not the only ones to offer beguiling short stories this season. The long-neglected art of yarn spinning is robust again, in three fine collections. Joan Chase's Bonneville Blue (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 226 pages; $16.95) contains 11 poignant tales. In one of the finest, Elderberries and Souls, the adolescent narrator recalls a passionate crush on her stepuncle: "I was smelling his cotton shirt, smoke and starch, and his soul, as if that, too, were a thing to be smelled." But a sudden glimpse of his unstable temper makes her realize how inexperienced she is in the ways...
Brazzaville Beach can be enjoyed as a superior suspense yarn: Will our heroine, who is no crusader but merely following scientific principles, prevail against the murderous plots of an evil genius defending his golden poppycock eggs? In fact that statement can be made without condescension, because swift and artful pacing is the novel's strongest quality. With his five earlier books, Boyd, 39, has gained an enviable reputation as an intellectual who wears his learning lightly, when he does not toss it aside completely. Stars and Bars was a smart send-up of both British and American roads to corruption...
...classic characteristics of both the responsible, rule-oriented eldest daughter and the mediator-rebel middle child. She has the looks and name of her late mother, who died of cancer when Madonna was only five. She has now learned the craft of spinning autocinematic tapestries out of the yarn of her private anguish. Her mother's death left her to cope with a father, two older brothers and a stepmother ruling over her, and ample chores helping to raise her five younger siblings. She grew up with considerable maternal responsibility but little actual power. So she rebelled and eventually hearkened...
...glamorous notions are seldom accurate. Yet for TIME correspondents Jonathan Beaty and Sam Gwynne, who together unearthed and wrote last month's story on the scandal engulfing the Bank of Credit & Commerce International and this week's special report on the B.C.C.I. as well, the reality of chasing the yarn was as thrilling as the best detective fiction...
...surprising pleasures. Characters find themselves reproved by expectation, exiles on all fronts. At their best, his stories have the everyday magic of tall tales overheard at the local tea stall. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the neighbor who runs away with the Irish fireman's wife in one yarn -- to an ashram in Pondicherry, no less -- goes by the name of Scheherazade...