Review by New York Times Review
LIKE AN ALIEN intent on some meticulous anthropological mission on Earth, Alexandra Kleeman seems always to be encountering the world for the first time. In "Intimations," her first story collection, she places us in both the realm of skewed, weird-dream fables (as signaled by a title like "Fairy Tale") and the more recognizable settings of realist stories, no less strange for it. Whether in a generic beach resort ("Jellyfish") or an apocalyptic tundra of AstroTurf and bunnies ("Rabbit Starvation"), the world is parsed with a charming exactitude that magnifies all its latent marvels and especially horrors - the blacker and more peculiar these stories get, the funnier they are. In "Lobster Dinner," for instance, love blooms parodic amid the bloody ruins of cracked carapaces, "some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks," as the notion of a lobster dinner - that cliché of normative romance - is wickedly inverted. ("You are running toward me while the lobsters are killing us all, your hair ruffled in the breeze and the sun glistening off your smooth shoulders.") It's "Baywatch" meets B-movie, by way of David Foster Wallace. Elsewhere, the humor is quieter and more unnerving. "A Brief History of Weather" constitutes a curtailed, self-generated universe, reminiscent of those in Ben Marcus's "The Age of Wire and String." Inside a sheltered house, a family studies and seeks to control the weather and, as in Marcus's stories, these taxonomizing tendencies yield a curiously lucid lyricism: "The snow is what sand would be if it could forget its material"; "A cloud shaped like an anvil impends." Kleeman is interested in precision not just at the level of prose but as an ideal. Here this ideal appears to be purely meteorological, but by the story's end, the house, that "single block of shatterproof plastic," has suggested itself as a metaphor for the writer's mind. Within, you can calibrate, analyze and log - a precise ruler of your universe. Beyond, it's an unruly old world, one that includes the messy mystery of the body. Like the weather, it's easily measured but not so easily marshaled. Kleeman, a highly cerebral writer, is especially fascinated by the oddness of bodies. Her first novel, the irresistibly weird and slyly wise "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine," considered what it is to be an assemblage of organs, "a massed wetness pressing in on itself." In the story "I May Not Be the One You Want, but I Am the One for You" there's a similar shiver at what Karen, the narrator, registers as the "unbearably sensual" nature of other people. When she imagines a man's "small, rubbery tongue twisting within the dry mouth," that use of "the" in place of "his" makes the image even creepier. In the same story, an innocuous bottle of water in turn transfixes, confounds and finally horrifies. Karen accepts this gift from a man in a cafe and as she does, catalogs it as "a tiny diorama, heavy and plastic-cool." Observing the tiny waterfall on its label, the "miniature mountains, shrouded in pixelated mist," she then wonders: "But where were all the fish, the birds, the vacationing tourists with their bikinis and cameras? They've all drowned, Karen realized suddenly. She put the bottle down." The hermetic plastic water bottle of this story and the sealed weather house seem to intimate the same thing: that the world reduced to precise and wholly legible terms is the world made dead. It's this same knowledge that makes Kleeman's stories so brilliantly alive. 'You are running toward me while the lobsters are killing us all.' HERMIONE HOBY'S first novel, "Neon in Daylight," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 2, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Kleeman follows her much-discussed debut, You Too Can Have a Body like Mine (2015), with a cerebral story collection about the torments of an abrasive world and such visceral topics as mortality, vulnerability, love, and loss of control. Many of the 12 tales are infused with the surreal or intangible a narrator must choose from among many strange paramours; lobsters take revenge during a Cape Cod holiday; a party goes awry when guests are suddenly axed in the back. In the standout, You, Disappearing, a crumbling relationship is set against the end days, which creep up quietly in moments of vanishing. The uncanny stories in parts 1 and 3 bookend a series of more structured narratives in part 2. Choking Victim follows Karen, a young mother on an excursion with her infant daughter, and delves into the past as well as her present-day responsibilities. In another tale, Karen, here a writer, struggles to finish an article in the wake of a breakup. Kleeman thoroughly owns her material, and her inventive collection offers a prodigious exploration into distinctive realms.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Following her excellent debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Kleeman brings her twisted, evocative style to a thought-provoking collection of stories. In "Fairy Tale," Kleeman creates a dreamlike scene: a woman sits at a banquet table that feels "sorely, mortally dangerous." A man appears and provides "assurances that I love you, that I think of you deeply," and then says, "Also, I came here to kill you." Barbarism and the perils of intimacy continue as themes throughout the collection. "The Weather" is an atmospheric, metaphysical examination of a family ("We study the weather from within this house, and we are the weather within this house"). The stories in the second section of the book have a more realistic but no less unsettling tone. "Choking Victim," about a lonely young mother, stands out as an exploration of the lurking danger of the everyday. In the third and final section, Kleeman explores death and endings: "Fake Blood" is about a party that turns dark and violent while "Hylomorphosis" is about what, exactly, angels are made of. These stories, absurdist, bleak, and funny, defy straightforward interpretation and instead linger long afterward, to be reinterpreted as they mutate in the reader's mind. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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