Women Drinking Benedictine

by Sharon Dilworth

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814208126
• ISBN13: 9780814208120
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

as good as the review in the Free Press

I read a review of this book in the Detroit Free Press and in the New York Times. It is just as good as both reviews claim. Full of wit and poignant moments -- I'd recommend it to all.

a great book -- funny, but moving

The stories in this collection are moving, extremley funny. It's a great holiday gift.

A witty, original story collection.

Sharon Dilworth's "Women Drinking Benedictine" is one of the wittiest, most original story collections I have read in years. In landscapes ranging from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Miami, Florida, Dilworth's characters are often deeply baffled by their own lives. In "Figures on the Shore," a story that is hilarious in its middle and deeply mysterious in the end, a woman, Janeene, opens her door to men in orange Day-Glo jackets one night; they've had car trouble and need to use the phone. These men, revealed as father and son, argue in front of Janeene, who quietly enjoys their banter as relief from the silence of the northern Michigan landscape. Dilworth lets these men go on with their verbal sparring until eventually they are on the floor, punching and wrestling. Janeene simply watches this without judgement, and the comedy is almost emblematic of "scenes" we all endure in our lives when strangers puncture our privacy without hesitation or self-consciousness. Readers will laugh here at Dilworth's brilliant understatement, achieved because, like so many of her characters, Janeene's perceptions have a matter-of-fact quality that suggest she's ready for anything. Almost all of these characters dread boredom more than the bizarre. Certainly this is true of the title story, "Women Drinking Benedictine," where readers will enjoy an intricately shaped story that reads like a strange mystery, with twists and turns that eventually cast cold light on the speaker of the story. In the sub-plot of this story, the world magazine models infiltrate this remote winter landscape. A resident alcoholic character in the story who witnesses these models (who come into the bar for Benedictine) seems to feel they are angels from another world. After they disappear from the bar, all he needs to do is find them. Dilworth gets you to feel the out-back quality of this place that sees itself only in the shadow of a pop-culture that has no regard for its existence. In this, as in every story, you can't help laughing at what's always a dark comedy bordering on the tragic. In the beautiful story "Awaken With My Mother's Dreams," Dilworth reveals a mother who is both a recent widow and a passionate Detroit Pistons fan. She's bored without her husband, and does not take much comfort in the traditional role expected of women at this age: she's tired of remembering, and grandchildren don't fill this void. It's a delight to hear mother and daughter talking about the mother's outrageous dream to play men's basketball. "You'd be awfully short," says the daughter. But the mother knows her stuff, knows that not all the players are that tall, and "Spud Webb's only 5'6." And the "shortest player in the NBA is only 5'3". Tyrone Mugsy Bogues." Dilworth reveals the affection and protectiveness the daughter feels without sentimentality. And the mother, dreamer that she is, is also firmly rooted on earth, a realist who knows she'll neve