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Summary
Summary
A collection of short stories that explores the experience of a range of characters whose physical and mental handicaps both compel and inhibit each one's search for love, from the author of Fallen Angel.
Author Notes
Barbara Gowdy was born in Windsor in 1950 but grew up in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, after having moved there with her family in 1954. After graduating from high school in the late 1960s, she studied at York University and the Royal Conservatory of Music. In the early 1980s, Gowdy became an editor for the publisher Lester and Orpen Dennys. She has also taught creative writing at Ryerson and the University of Toronto and has worked as an interviewer for the TVOntario program, Imprint.
Gowdy has been a finalist for several prominent literary awards, including the Trillium Award for We So Seldom Look on Love and the Trillium Award, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General's Award for Mr. Sandman. The White Bone has also been nominated for the Giller Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
These eight short stories employ both satire and morbid humor to explore the lives of emotionally and physically abnormal characters. Among the protagonists: a pathetically goofy hyperactive child in foster care; Siamese twins equipped with two pairs of legs, two sets of female genitalia and one active libido; a little girl who creates chants to shrink the head of her hydrocephalic playmate; a young woman, unable to find satisfaction in her marriage, who poses nude in front of her living room window to excite the voyeur who lives across the way; and the two necrophiliacs of the title story, which takes its name from a Frank O'Hara poem. While their behavior is sometimes macabre, these people show extraordinary gutsiness, refusing to allow their abnormalities to diminish their capacities for life and love in whatever form it takes. Canadian novelist Gowdy ( Falling Angels ) writes with a bite that grants her characters earthy courage without allowing them to lapse into self-pity. Her daring high-wire act may not appeal to everyone, but her stories are not easily forgotten. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A debut collection from Canadian novelist Gowdy (Through the Green Valley, 1988) limns--with dark humor and wry compassion--the lives of those on the margins of normality. The stories here all share a common theme, echoed in the title--which comes from a poem, ``Necrophilia,'' by Frank O'Hara, that suggests ``it is better that someone loves them'': ``them'' being the dead, the physically and psychologically impaired. The title piece, narrated by a female necrophiliac and hearse driver who's been obsessed with the dead since childhood, makes her obsession no less palatable but, in the context, understandable: ``I have found no replacement for the torrid serenity of a cadaver, absorbing their energy, blazing it back out. Since that energy came from the act of life alchemizing into death, there's a possibility it was alchemical itself.'' In ``Body and Soul''--about Aunt Bea, a religious, elderly widow who provides a loving home for a brain- damaged little girl, abandoned by her mother--Gowdy accomplishes the rare feat of making goodness a compelling reality that is neither mawkish nor dull. In ``Sylvie,'' a young woman born with a set of extra hips and limbs is taken from the freak show where she works by a wealthy young doctor who's fallen in love with her--but she fears that after the surgery he suggests, she'll ``become somebody else.'' Other tales detail the anguish of a ``Two-headed Man''; the reactions of a woman who finds she's married a transsexual (``Flesh of My Flesh''); and the experience of a young mother who's lost her child in a grotesque accident (``Lizards''). Gowdy skillfully walks a fine line between sensationalism and sentimentality to give life and love to the feared and forgotten. An impressive accomplishment.
