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.''