Director Of The World And Other Stories
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The characters in Jane McCafferty’s Director of the World and Other Stories are often distanced, lonely, or displaced from others and the events around them, yet they are almost always ready to act, to become involved with others, and to change. In “Eyes of Others,” a woman, stopping with her family at a Howard Johnson’s during a trip, becomes fascinated by the meeting of two strangers and attempts to connect with them as she has been unable to connect with her own family.
Implicit in these stories is a rootlessness that gives way to yearning and a passion for remembering. In the title story, a disturbed child, whose father has recently abandoned the family, attempts, in language reflecting her shattered sense of the world, to recapture some of their last experiences together.
These characters, and others in the collection, attempt to make sense of their broken lives and shattered thoughts. As John Wideman writes of the stories, there is “a sense of commitment to the struggle of making silent worlds speak, of forcing what is threatening or evil or destructive into some form we can see and conjure with.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of the 1992 Drue Heinz Prize, McCafferty presents 11 powerful, melancholic stories whose theme is deterioration--of relationships and of the mind. Her weary characters usually feel abandoned, at least figuratively, by their families, but rather than effecting change or making decisions, they simply reflect on the cumulative experiences that led to their present ennui. In the disturbing title story (also included in Best American Short Stories 1991 ), a child witnesses the division of her family after her father returns, psychologically ruined, from a war. The particularly wrenching ``By the Light of Friendship'' shows a lonely man nervously awaiting his 14-year-old daughter at the bus station, only to be told she has decided not to visit him. In ``The Shadders Go Away,'' a mother taking her young sons on vacation feels overwhelmed by their unresponsiveness even as she acts jovial and hopeful. Reading McCafferty's collection, one feels empathy for characters trapped by circumstance and inertia; rather than disdain them, we share the poignancy of their experiences.
