Book Review - Alone With You

My latest completed book is another in a long line of solid recommendations from Amazon readers, Alone With You (Stories), by Marisa Silver (2010). There are eight stories in this brief 164 page collection, and all are solid. Silver has an easy style, and it was a breeze getting through this in a few evenings. Her characters include a wide range of people such as a woman being left by her husband, a woman caring for her very ill mother, a woman dealing with mental illness, and a mentally retarded woman who gets pregnant and has a baby boy who turns out to be normal developing. "Pond", the story of the handicapped mother, could be the basis of a novel, yet as it is the story covers a remarkable range of time and circumstance in only 19 pages. Silver is an author I will definitely read more from.

"Vivian's mother sat in her chair and smiled shyly, like a girl watching a boy approach across a dance floor and realizing that he has singled her out from all the girls around her." [p. 13]

"His face relaxed and opened up, and Vivian saw how great the barriers were between a person and his happiness, and how little it took to make him think they were small." [p. 15]

"In Julia's darker moments, she wondered whether Burton's endless supply of optimism was a ruse, a screen he erected that made it impossible for Julia to express what each one knew to be true: that Burton not only found intellectual solace outside of the house, but on more than one occasion had found physical escape as well. She had learned that his cheerful intimacy was a disguise worn by a remote man who waved at his own life as if from a distant shore." [p. 78]

"She was not sure why she hadn't kicked him out in the end, except that she had begun to look forward to the outsized emotions of his entreaties, the late-night talks, the tears. She knew that the high drama was silly, but it reminded her of the kind of person she had once been - a girl who would weep when her rendition of a Beethoven adagio did not live up to the version that played in her imagination, a girl who would mourn that perfection was too difficult a goal to aim for and too crushing to fall short of." [pp. 104-105]

"...and Helen was sent hurtling back to the time when she herself had been unable to make her music perfect, when she had been filled with sadness and rage and hope and the aching sense of being close, but not close enough, to beauty." [p. 119]

Read this year: 24 [totalling 5,446 pages]
Published in 2010: 15 [including this]
New authors: 15 [including this]
Classics: still 3