Isobars: Stories

President Jimmy Carter has been quoted as saying that life is not fair. The statement is certainly true as it relates to Ms. Hospital. It isn't fair that one person should have so much talent. On the other hand, we can all be glad that she keeps writing extraordinary short stories and novels. ISOBARS contains fifteen short stories, all of which are as good as we have come to expect from this writer. They are about loss, sorrow, violence, missed opportunities. While many of the men in these stories behave very badly-- law enforcement officers rape a trusting school teacher, and boys steal the clothes of a teacher and her two female students while they are skinnydipping-- many of the characters, both men and women, have a strong resilience and courage, even in defeat. Ms. Hospital takes the reader through a landmine of terrific words and phrases. The past is a "Dead Letter Office." The children of a man's second marriage "had not yet reached the age of disappointment." An old man in a rooming house has been "left stranded by old age and widowerhood." His housemates "came and went, anything could claim them: death, a son or daughter whose conscience got the upper hand for a while, loss of memory." Another character has "learned to let happiness come and go, without anxiety. It always did keep coming again, in new and surprising shapes." One could do worse than have that philosophy. I am always so amazed and undone by what this writer does with so few words. In the last selection in this book, "Here and Now," in six and a half pages she tells a story of death and loss that will convince you she's as good a living writer as there is. In Toronto, Allison, a college professor who at fifty has just learned that her mother has died in Sydney, consoles Walter, a ninety-year-old retired professor, who remembers the loss of his son who has died in an accident in Australia. They both are awash with memory and sorrow-- as is the reader. Ms. Turner is an amazing writer.

A brilliant volume of short stories dealing with multiple acts and varieties of violence and pain and how people deal with them. From the chilling "The Last of the Hapsburgs", which tells of the assaults on women's attempts to construct a zone of solidarity and non-competitive friendship, to the droll "The Chameleon Condition", that imagines how it would be if a philandering professor involuntarily displayed his responses to the world through changes in skin color, the volume ranges through anger to a wise appreciation of our efforts to erect bulwarks against the depradations of time and loss. Hospital's sharp and clever prose never meanders and each story manages to surprise and ring new changes on her basic themes.