Jessica Francis Kane write(s) in the tradition of Alice Munro or Russell Banks - stories that are small windows onto ordinary, troubled lives.
Kane's sparse but poignant writing satisfies...these heartrending stories will convince even the optimist that some sad stories need telling.
Kane's debut collection is achingly, pitch-perfectly sad, detailing painful adult awkwardness and the lost respect of beloved children.
So, general public, feel free to plunge into Kane's work...You'll be thrilled at what you find: short stories that are bright, elegant, graceful and imaginative.
Each story...captures these people...in the troublesome middle of unbearable sameness and the untidiness of life....Well-written and entirely credible.
Fiction Notes Jessica Francis Kane's Bending Heaven contains 11 sober, affecting short stories that delve beneath the surfaces of ordinary people's lives and reveal their internal struggles. The setups are simple: a divorced lawyer worries about her teenaged son while she is on a corporate retreat ("Refuge"); a young woman moves to New York and finds the book publishing business is less literary than she expected ("How to Become a Publicist"); two newlyweds house-sit for a well-off older couple and anxieties about their new life together arise ("Ideas of Home, but Not the Thing Itself"). Kane's style is direct yet nuanced, and all her characters feel authentic; this is an impressive debut. (July) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
This exquisite collection of stories examines ordinary people trying to explain their failures to themselves or others. Sarah drinks too much, upsetting her teenaged daughter; an English major tries to succeed as a publicist in New York City; and an employee, bored at a corporate retreat, realizes that she lacks many things that matter and can't find fun in things that don't matter. Kane also brings us a couple living in Paris during the husband's sabbatical, who appear unable to communicate; a mother and her young son as they choose items to sell at a yard sale before a pending divorce; and an extremely sensitive writer with a pathological fear of being photographed, among others. Her characters are all melancholy, all unsuccessful in their efforts, and probably all doomed to failure they are, in other words, real people with real problems. Kane's writing style is extremely realistic and down to earth. Though her short stories have appeared in many magazines, this is her first book. Highly recommended. Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Eleven downbeat stories, five published previously, from newcomer Kane: blues variations that form an insistent but eloquent study of faces of quiet desperation. There are the drinkers: Sarah, first, in "Evidence of Old Repairs," whose efforts to connect with her teenaged daughter while on a family holiday in London are complicated by the memories both have of Sarah's rum-and-Coke afternoons at home; and then Shelley, in "Refuge," an aging associate in a prominent Washington law firm, who attends the firm's weekend retreat days after having sent her teenager away to live with his dad, no longer able to cope with him, and who binges her way through the pain. And there are the seekers: The mathematician in "The Arnold Proof," at 46 close to the twilight of his career, close to cracking the proof of the notorious Riemann Hypothesis, but also closer than ever to cracking up when he has an epiphany in an interstate rest area; and the publicist in "How to Become a Publicist," a midwestern girl lured by New York publishing, who quickly tires of the inanity of it all and applies to grad school. And then there are those for whom objects have assumed unnatural significance: Lena in "Ideas of Home, but Not the Thing Itself," a newlywed who covets the furnishings of the Georgetown house she and her young husband are sitting; and the young boy in "First Sale," faced with his mother's determination to get rid of stuff after his father leaves them, but who cannot bear to part with a bottle of Maryland lake water he had scooped up at the end of a family vacation. These characters, along with others equally on edge, give voice to the ceaseless yearnings that-so Kane's volume suggests-preoccupy us almostfrom the cradle to the grave. Lovers of lighthearted fiction, fear to tread here.
