Stealing Time

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4. APR. 1994

Time preys on the (mostly) female protagonists of these 14 carefully wrought and quietly breathtaking stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker . Grimm ( Left to Themselves ) catalogues with subtlety the daily acts, petty and precious, that women are consumed by but through which, paradoxically, they fulfill themselves. Gleeful college girls in ``Research'' gather lists of the ``guys'' with whom they might lose their virginity, but for the narrator the moment of loss is a lyrical glimpse of inevitability and impersonality, as if she were caught up in a musical phrase. The superbly understated ``We'' tells of three women, glowing in their young marriages and maternal tasks, rising up at night ``into sleep and dreams, as light as birds.'' After this domestic phase quickly passes, they look back at it wonderingly. The narrator of ``Interview with My Mother'' prods her bedridden parent for old memories and struggles to see how the trivia adds up. In ``The Life of the Body,'' jilted Kate feels robbed when her old lover, a husky red-haired poet, flagrantly expropriates her own grief in his verse. In the harrowing ``Bring Back the Dead,'' Karen waits out the ``stiff time'' for word of Jenny, her vanished 12-year-old daughter. And, poignantly, it is love stories that keep death at bay in ``True Stories''; they are ``like a gun . . . trained on the future.''