Monogamy: Stories

by Marly Swick

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060974524
• ISBN13: 9780060974527
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly good

Marly Swick has written an arresting collection of stories in "Monogamy." They are arresting not because of their magnificence or grandeur, but rather because of their simplicity and angularity; they have the attractiveness of weathered, split rock - gritty and appealing an a way that the reader may not be able to put their finger on - immediately or ever at all.The stories read like raw slices from everyday life - like cross-sections, cut whole and lifted, quivering and warm, from the lives of the people about whom the stories are written. By definition, a short story is brief excursion into someone's life - not a whole story, not novelized, but pieces like amputated limbs. Swick's collection is reminiscent of those limbs in the respect that we find that just when a story is getting good or seems to be going somewhere, it ends abruptly. It is as though, running a hand down your leg, you find, shockingly, that there is nothing below your knee where you expected the rest of your leg to be.That is not to say that these are not good stories. On the contrary, they are well written, and the same quality that applies to their truncated nature applies to their general feel and texture. They are not predictable; they catch the reader off guard, twisting of into unexplored regions and corridors of the mind. Most importantly, the characters don't behave as one would expect them to; they behave like real people, rather than characters in a book.Although none of the stories is linked to each other in the sense that they are all different situations with different people and ideas, they are all bound by the common thread of monogamy; they are all loosely connected by this idea and others related to it. In fact, one of the stories, rather than concerning itself with monogamy specifically, focuses instead on the idea of polygamy - with some interesting results.The stories are reminiscent of Alice Munro, in that they have ordinary people doing "ordinary" things - although how any one person defines "ordinary" is so relative to one person as to be almost meaningless to the population at large. The things that these characters do are so oridinary that occasionally they may seem quite bizarre to the reader - like viewing a bird through the wrong end of a telescope and wondering how it can look so small and far-off, and yet at the same time so perfectly correct.