Ice Cream

In this collection of short stories, Helen Dunmore focuses on quick, in-depth character sketches. The reader is exposed to a variety of scenarios, from the reality based--in the title story, an actress denies herself her favorite indulgencies in order to maintain her fame--to the unreal--a story of a horrific future where cloning is praised and natural births are punished. Many of the plots involve themes of serious illness and/or death, including "You Stayed Awake With Me" (a woman with terminal illness confronts the past), "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife" (a doting husband reflects on loss), "Emily's Ring" (a young girl is burdened with the care of her many half-siblings), and "Lisette" (a promosing young family is doomed in WWII France). Many of the tales are set in the past; the time isn't always specified, but several stories have a turn of the century feel. One character, Ulli, appears in three different stories; at first, she seems to be a world-weary woman, but in the final story, we learn that she is a 16 year old girl. Of the 18 stories in the book, most are 10-12 pages in length, with the longest being 24 pages and the shortest being only 4 pages. Overall, this book is a short, engaging read that may leave you wondering what happens next.

You know the saying: you can't tell a book by its cover. As a reviewer, I don't take looks too seriously but I have to admit this is one cute package: a slim vanilla volume covered by a shiny dust jacket with candy-colored stripes and a picture of an (empty) ice-cream dish. It is almost edible.In fact, the title story wasn't by any means my favorite --- it's a sort of glamorous throwaway about the suppression of appetite and its greedy return. But Dunmore, who is also a poet, writes so sensuously and precisely that she can make nearly anything matter. Best known as the author of elegant, pared-down psychological thrillers like TALKING TO THE DEAD and WITH YOUR CROOKED HEART, she has recently ventured beyond that genre with THE SIEGE, a novel set in the USSR during World War II. And now comes this collection of 18 stories --- none of which, as far as I can make out, have been published previously.Stories aren't usually my thing, except when they're by Alice Munro or Katherine Mansfield. If they move me, I want more; I want to be immersed for days (if possible) in a world of somebody else's making. Still, there is something thrilling about the way a story can begin with a moment and then open up to an entire life --- but subtly and concisely, so you get only the details you need and not the entire family tree. Dunmore seems to know instinctively just how much to tell: not so much that the narrative loses pace and edge, not so little that it becomes annoyingly cryptic. And her talent is such that ICE CREAM, although uneven in quality (short-story collections inevitably are), lives up to its name. I wanted to devour it all at once and had to make myself take it in slowly, bite by voluptuous bite.Dunmore's sense of language is extraordinary: lush, unhackneyed and rhythmic. She has a way of getting inside a character's head and making herself at home there; the stream of sensation, memory and ephemera is perfectly believable. In "You Stayed Awake With Me," two friends, one of them ill, revisit a childhood summerhouse --- and some past betrayals. "Pain is a climate like winter," the sick woman thinks. "It closes over you and soon you can't imagine not living in it. Some days, when I wake, before I move, I pretend to myself. I think I've got away. I'm stepping off a plane into a different climate where warm, spicy breezes blow your clothes against your thighs. I'm walking so lightly and easily that it feels like flying." "The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife," one of the best stories in the book, presents us with a man in mourning whose conversation with himself becomes our lens for a woman's hard, isolated, sturdy life: "Slowly, methodically, he would climb the lighthouse tower, toward the light, thinking of her. A mound of sea thudded against the tower, then fell back and weaseled at the foot of the rock, getting its strength. Nancy said she did not mind thinking of him in the lighthouse, no matter how bad the storms, but what she kept out of her thoughts was