Fidelity
Stories
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed poet and Giller Prize–winning novelist Michael Redhill comes Fidelity, a subtle but searing collection of short fiction.
By turns brooding, strange, and funny, Fidelity probes the blandishments of temptation, the swooning submission to concupiscence, the illusory redemption of desire, the ambivalence at the heart of the most intimate trust, and, most importantly, the irony that when we betray, we betray ourselves first.
His characters are not monsters, or really even sinners. Their vulnerabilities are our own: a business-trip affair leaves a man changed in ways he cannot anticipate; a young girl’s sexuality inflicts unexpected wounds on her family; the young amanuensis of a 156-year-old Civil War veteran tries to defend his hero from accusations of desertion; a father of four, pressured by his wife to undergo a vasectomy, gradually learns that he is capable of infidelity when he contemplates the intolerable loss of his virility.
Spell-binding and crackling with an unflinching attention to emotional detail, Fidelity looks boldly at the transgressions of desire that seduce, and sometimes break, body and soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heartbreak and betrayal run through Redhill's slim collection of muted but well-wrought stories examining the damage people inflict on themselves and others when their relationships fail. Redhill (Martin Sloane) gives his characters believable vulnerabilities and a touching humanity, even as they make messes of their lives: a traveling school-portrait photographer who visits his ex-wife each year tries but fails to tell her how things have changed; a father finds himself unable to cope with his teenage daughter's shocking sexual behavior; a young woman struggling with a rocky relationship doubts the very idea of connection to another person; and a Jewish man wrestles with the morality of banking his sperm before he has a vasectomy that will make intimacy with his wife easier. In one of the most affecting stories, "Long Division," a precocious child bears the burden of his parents' disenchantment with each other. Redhill's writing is graceful, so his stories of people who are "lonesome with people and without them" are moving without being maudlin. Most of the 10 tales contain a whopper of a flashback a childhood memory that goes a long way toward explaining how the protagonist became the scarred adult he or she is and while the device begins to feel overused, it's a small flaw in an otherwise quietly moving collection.
