A review by kinbote4zembla
We So Seldom Look on Love: Stories by Barbara Gowdy
4.0
Deep down, beneath the lurid sex and freakish characters, this collection of short stories, We So Seldom Look on Love -- a gorgeous title borrowed from a poem by Frank O'Hara --, has a gooey, warm heart.
I think, this book is absolutely divisive. Some people will see Barbara Gowdy's stories as exploitative and desperate in the way of many modern writers trying to seem transgressive. But others will see these stories for what they are: each offers a nuanced and daring exploration of loneliness and isolation from extreme perspectives.
And the saving grace of it all really is the compassion and empathy infused in Gowdy's writing
For instance, the story that is the most obviously outrageous is the eponymous story, which is the confession of a self-diagnosed "necrophile." She has sex with the corpses she encounters in her place of employment, a mortuary. But it's really a love story, in a way. The empty love affair she has with a medical student culminates in his suicide, since he knows she could only ever love his corpse. As morbid and disturbing as that is, it is also a very refreshing and compelling way of looking at love and obsession and life and death.
These really are just classic short stories gussied up with modern sensibilities. And they are wonderfully provocative. They beg for contemplation and they offer the reader no simple answers. This is a book that rewards your thought.
If there is anything that detracts from this book, it is that slightly obnoxious need to be transgressive. It works, most of the time. But there are instances - as with the mentally challenged little girl in "Body and Soul" drilling a hole into her own forehead -- where the transgression seems slightly off. The symbolism, even when it's cringe-worthy, is always new, though, to Gowdy's credit.
Her concision -- this is a thin volume -- means that she doesn't retread material. (At least, not deeply or troublingly. Two stories feature the overall concept of conjoined twins, but differ greatly in style, content, and tone. And "Lizards" and "Flesh of My Flesh" tell the disparate stories of two friends.)
This is such a neat little book. There isn't much dead air, in that the stories are all of a consistently high quality. And I think, in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Allan Poe and James Purdy, the stories of the outsiders, of the grotesque, even though they can be the most troubling, are the most mundane, almost. They hit upon a very basic fear or insecurity that exists in everyone, I think, and they exploit that feeling in all of us and ask us to wonder what it is and why it's there. They blow things up so that we can better see the details in the darkness. And really, if books like this weren't out there, how would some of us ever encounter the people on the fringes? The corpse-fuckers and the bored exhibitionists and the conjoined twins and the God-fearing girls who can levitate, where would they be without writers like Barbara Gowdy?
4 Hard-to-Reach Dildos out of 5
I think, this book is absolutely divisive. Some people will see Barbara Gowdy's stories as exploitative and desperate in the way of many modern writers trying to seem transgressive. But others will see these stories for what they are: each offers a nuanced and daring exploration of loneliness and isolation from extreme perspectives.
And the saving grace of it all really is the compassion and empathy infused in Gowdy's writing
For instance, the story that is the most obviously outrageous is the eponymous story, which is the confession of a self-diagnosed "necrophile." She has sex with the corpses she encounters in her place of employment, a mortuary. But it's really a love story, in a way. The empty love affair she has with a medical student culminates in his suicide, since he knows she could only ever love his corpse. As morbid and disturbing as that is, it is also a very refreshing and compelling way of looking at love and obsession and life and death.
These really are just classic short stories gussied up with modern sensibilities. And they are wonderfully provocative. They beg for contemplation and they offer the reader no simple answers. This is a book that rewards your thought.
If there is anything that detracts from this book, it is that slightly obnoxious need to be transgressive. It works, most of the time. But there are instances - as with the mentally challenged little girl in "Body and Soul" drilling a hole into her own forehead -- where the transgression seems slightly off. The symbolism, even when it's cringe-worthy, is always new, though, to Gowdy's credit.
Her concision -- this is a thin volume -- means that she doesn't retread material. (At least, not deeply or troublingly. Two stories feature the overall concept of conjoined twins, but differ greatly in style, content, and tone. And "Lizards" and "Flesh of My Flesh" tell the disparate stories of two friends.)
This is such a neat little book. There isn't much dead air, in that the stories are all of a consistently high quality. And I think, in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Allan Poe and James Purdy, the stories of the outsiders, of the grotesque, even though they can be the most troubling, are the most mundane, almost. They hit upon a very basic fear or insecurity that exists in everyone, I think, and they exploit that feeling in all of us and ask us to wonder what it is and why it's there. They blow things up so that we can better see the details in the darkness. And really, if books like this weren't out there, how would some of us ever encounter the people on the fringes? The corpse-fuckers and the bored exhibitionists and the conjoined twins and the God-fearing girls who can levitate, where would they be without writers like Barbara Gowdy?
4 Hard-to-Reach Dildos out of 5