I got an email from a publisher marketing associate recently,
suggesting that since I was such a fan of Alice Munro I might also like the
stories of Roxana Robinson and perhaps be willing read her collection Asking for Love and review it on my
blog.
I was familiar with Roxana Robinson's stories from the past, so I said
yes and started the process of getting a copy of the book in e-format online,
which involved registering with NetGalley, a website that started back in 2008
(but with which I was unfamiliar), which allows publishers to distribute
digital galley proofs of books—a cheaper
alternative to sending out those paperbound galley proofs I used to get
regularly when I was reviewing books for newspapers.
After a bit of a struggle, I got the book to my Kindle Fire and started
reading the first couple of stories. I thought they sounded vaguely
familiar. So I checked my file cabinet,
and sure enough there was a Roxana Robinson folder, and damn all, there was a
review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer
from 1996 for a collection of stories entitled Asking for Love. I then checked my bookcase, and sure enough, there
was a hardback copy of Asking for Love, albeit with a different
cover than the one that showed up on my Kindle. What is this, thought I?
A little research revealed what the marketing associate neglected to
tell me, perhaps thinking I already knew: The publisher of Robinson's
"new" book, Open Road Media, specializes in publishing the "backlist"--books
that have been around for a few years, but out of print, or at least not
available as ebooks.
Co-founded by Jane Friedman, who was once the CEO of HarperCollins,
Open Road Media seeks out authors or author estates and offers them a 50% cut
of whatever profits the book earns as an ebook—something they can do because
they do not have the overhead that traditional publishers face--storing stock,
maintaining big offices, hiring lots of salespeople, etc.
Pretty smart, especially since many readers these days prefer reading
on a Kindle or i-pad to turning paper pages.
Actually, nowadays I find myself reading more Kindle copies than
physical books. I have over a hundred
books on my Kindle now. They are often cheaper (although that seems to be
changing), and space on my bookcases is getting sparse (I keep boxing them up
for a local Friends of the Library), and I can read at night without turning on
the bedside lamp (thus keeping my wife awake).
However, most all the books that Open Road Media offers (although they
are starting to publish new books) are also available at on-line used book
stores. A quick check on Amazon reveals
three versions of Asking for Love,
with three different covers: Open Road's Kindle version of Asking
for Love will cost you $11.49, whereas you can get a used hardcover copy in
"good" condition for $.24 and a used paperback copy in "very
good" condition for $1.15. Of course, you have to add $3.98 for
shipping. So, you ask yourself: do I
spend $11.49 for an e-version or $4 or $5 for an old-fashioned physical version,
perhaps with a few underlining? Maybe Open Road should lower their prices.
I have just finished my second reading the fifteen stories in Roxana Robinsons'
Asking for Love on my Kindle. Twenty years separate this e-reading and my
original hard-cover reading. Since I did not review that first reading, I
cannot compare, for I have forgotten my first response. I have read a helluva lot of stories since
then. But here's what I thought this time around:
Perhaps the most frequently quoted comment on Roxana Robinson's stories
is the one by fellow author Bret Lott in his New York Times Book Review of her first collection A Glimpse of Scarlet (1991). Lott said
that Robinson "may be John Cheever's heir apparent." It's on the
cover of this new ebook edition of Asking
for Love. However, Lott was referring
to the similarities between the characters and social context of the two
authors—e.g. New York City, the Hamptons, Greenwich, Conn, post-dinner-party fights, affairs both known
and suspected, husbands and wives with some money and lots of marital angst,
etc.
In 1996, when Brooke Allen reviewed Robinson's second collection of
stories Asking for Love, she began
with this sentence: "Every time a new and promising WASP writer comes
along, it is his or her inevitable misfortune to be compared with John
Cheever." Allen then argued that although
Robinson focuses on the same social class of characters, she is "not
nearly as good as Cheever; her vision is neither as dark nor as rich, and her
outlook is somewhat limited in that it is an exclusively feminine one."
Cleveland Plain Dealer critic
Janice Harayda also weighed in on the Cheever comparison by suggesting that
pairing Robinson to Cheever reflected declining critical standards in 1996.
"The sort of encomiums that might once have been reserved for the masters
of the art are now doled out to the merely gifted." Harayda also acknowledged that there were
some social context similarities between Cheever and Robinson, e.g. stories
that centered on the East Coast world of money and privilege, boarding schools,
dancing and horseback lessons, summer house in the tonier regions of northern
New England. But Cheever's stories,
argues Harayda, "have a moral and spiritual dimension" absent from
those in Asking for Love.
I did a short blog essay on Cheever a few years ago, going back to read
such stories as "The Torch Song, "The Enormous Radio,” “O Youth and
Beauty,” “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” The Country Husband,” The Death of
Justina,” and “The Swimmer.” I did not find
them as compelling as I did when I first read them in the sixties. But when I looked at them again this week in
comparison to the stories of Roxana Robinson, I appreciated them all over
again.
Let me provide some brief critical summaries of some of Robinson's
stories in Asking for Love and then
risk a comment or two on what I think makes Cheever's stories more powerful
examples of the short story form than Robinson's, although, indeed Robinson's
stories are quite readable and capable. [a side note: most writes have a tic
they probably should be aware of and try to avoid. Reading on a Kindle, you can quickly spot one
of these and then do a search for the rest. Robinson has a tic for "heart pounding."
I have cited them in brackets."]
In the opening story, "Leaving Home,"—a 13-year-old girl goes
with her family for a yearly summer visit to a cousin's farm in Mass. She has
just become aware that, unlike her honorable parents, she is "deeply
deficient in virtue." In a bit of childish pique, she disappoints her
parents by saying she hates her 11-year-old cousin Gloria.
Cuing us that this is a coming-of-age story of sorts, Robinson tells us
this is the first summer the girl does not feel nourished by her family and
comforted by being in the farmhouse. She meets a neighborhood girl who is so
sophisticated that she feels lanky and wrong. She wants to be one of the in
crowd, but, alas, she likes to read. She wants to keep her virtuous
unacceptable family secret from the smart crowd.
When the dorky cousin asks her to go swimming, she fears it will
destroy her façade, contaminate her, expel her from the in crowd. When she sees
the sophisticated girl in a canoe, she swims to it and deserts the cousin.
"I fixed my gaze ahead, as though I could put my family behind me forever,
as though I would never have to look at them again." It's straightforward
and pretty predictable, a standard treatment of an obvious adolescent girl transition.
In "Sleepover," a seven-year-old girl named Bess wants to see
her mother as someone with a secret life. And indeed, Mom seems to be having an affair. Thus, the title refers to the mother rather
than the child. The father tries to
tolerate all this, but he looks around the living room "as though he were
on a doomed island, a tiny decaying principality that was slowly sinking,
lowering itself into destruction." ["Bess
took a step back from him, her heart pounding."]
"Slipping Away" gives us the point of view of a woman who has
been married for seven years and is having an affair. She and her husband have
a 27-year-old Spanish maid who has a "tempestuous private life." The
woman says, "It is like having the third act of an opera in your kitchen
every morning." She says her husband mistrusts all women and wishes all
women were there only to serve him. The story centers on a melodrama about the
husband listening to the wife's phone calls on another phone and her anxiety
level increasing. The wife thinks the
maid's marital drama never happens in English. The story ends with her feeling
her orderly life slipping way, "slipping into Spanish, right before my
eyes." It's an entertaining a comic
story about a woman's life becoming a telenovela. ["Still my heart was pounding."
"My heart was still pounding." "My heart was pounding even
more."]
In "The Nile in Flood," a couple married for five months take
a boat trip down the Nile on a belated honeymoon. She is forty-nine. He is
sixty-five. Much of this story is about
the wife's thoughts about her life. Feeling suffocated, she slips out of their
cabin one night. She wants something romantic in her life, but feels that it is
too late. The story ends with this: "She had not known that the line at
the end of passion would be so clearly marked, that the life that lay before
her would be so pale, so dry." This
is a pretty conventional story of a woman feeling she is growing too old for
the passion and romance of her youth. ["Nora's heart was pounding."]
In "Asking for Love, "the title story of the collection, the
narrator is at her parents' summer house in Maine with Melissa, her seventeen-year
old daughter. She is divorced from a
twenty-year-marriage, and has been dating a man for eight months. Melissa, who
has been at boarding school, does not want to see her mother with anyone but her
father. "She doesn't want me to be single; she wants me to be a
mother."
The narrator does a lot of
thinking, mostly as a writer would think, e.g.: "I think love should be
inexhaustible, like air, that we should give and take it freely, without
doubt." When her new lover kisses her, she thinks: "This is something
that never fails to surprise me—this sudden melting, turning-to-gold sensation. Before I married Michael I thought all sex
was good sex, I thought good sex was a given. Now I've learned that it's not a
given but a gift."
When she recognizes the young waitress at a restaurant, she thinks: "This
transformation from girl into young woman is a miracle, like a flower revealing
itself." She wants love from Melissa but will not ask for it. "Asking for love is the saddest question
in the world, and if you have to ask, the answer is too painful to hear." More authorial thinking: "Memory is
kaleidoscopic: the slightest shift creates another picture, detailed, complete,
convincing." When she and her lover are locked out of her house accidently,
and try to climb in a window, he steps away and she feels emptiness beneath
her. She cannot pull herself up and her heart seems to "have gone
out" of her--a final metaphor of her precarious position with daughter,
new man, etc.
"Halloween" is a simple story about a woman being frightened
of an adolescent boy she has allowed into her house on Halloween. And who she
fears is more interested in sexual tricks than innocent treats. The theme is explicitly
stated at the end: "The boy never
came back. I never saw him again, and I
never forgot him. I never forgot what he
had taught me: that here is as dangerous as anywhere, that safety is a fragile
membrane, easily pierced…. Maybe I was wrong to be alarmed…Or maybe I was
lucky." ["My heart was pounding." "My heart was still
pounding."
"Reign of Arlette" is about a woman who hires a twenty-five
year old au pair girl who initiates her son into sex. This story is also full of authorial
statements, e.g.: "When you're a single parent, you feel solely and wholly
responsible for your children, as though you were refugees, making your way
through a war-torn landscape." ["Unaccountably, my heart began to
pound."]
"Breaking the Rules" focuses primarily on a woman visiting
Scotland and getting into a quarrel with a Scottish man about gun control, with
all the usual clichés about that debate. ["She marched upstairs her blood
pounding." "With her heart pounding, she clambered at last up."
"her blood pounding in her ears, her face now slick with sweat."
"King of the Sky" moves toward a horrifying accident involving
a young rebellious boy, which makes the female narrator, who has a son of her
own, think the following explicit thematic thoughts:
"Most often there
are miracles; most children are saved.
When a miracle doesn't happen, when you hear that a child is lost, the
terrible sound of it echoes within your mind, a series of slow
reverberations. They continue, deep
inside you, distant and sinister. You feel terror, the vertiginous pull
downward, the drop that you escaped from no reason. And you hold our own child
close to you, close, no matter how he struggles."
["These
were loud, pulse-pounding moments."]
There are many differences between the stories of John Cheever and
Roxana Robinson, and Bret Lott did her no favor by comparing her to him. Robinson's
stories are written on a different level than those of Cheever. They are primarily plot-based with
understandable character motivation. They do not take chances, with Robinson
always making sure, usually with explicit statements of theme, that the reader
knows exactly what the story is meant to illustrate. Cheever, on the other
hand, always created a mythic, symbolic, folktale subtext that paralleled his
plots, and, like Chekhov, knew when to keep quiet and allow the reader to infer
the thematic significance he explored.
If you have a kindle or other i-pad that you can read in the outdoors, Asking for Love is a fine book to read
around the pool or take to the beach. It
will not make demands on you, and will reassure you that the author is a smart
psychologist or philosopher or sociologist, who knows the people and the
society about which she writes. And is happy to make sure you know them too.
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