A prize-winning poet (and MacArthur Fellow grant recipient) extends her literary mastery with a debut story collection. While these stories reflect the poet's plainspoken virtuosity and elliptical compression, they are very much rooted in her experience in the Pacific Northwest. Perillo (Inseminating the Elephant, 2009, etc.) majored in wildlife management and worked summers at Mount Rainier National Park. Not that she idealizes or sentimentalizes the natural world, but it puts her very human characters in perspective: "There was beauty…and also decay, and the years were just a factory for changing one into the other." The opening and closing stories ("Bad Boy Number Seventeen," "Late in the Realm"), as well as one in the middle ("Saint Jude in Persia"), have the same first-person narrator, a young (initially), spirited woman whose love life is undermined by her limited possibilities, as she deals with a sister with Down syndrome and a mother embittered by the husband who deserted them. Funny and sad in equal measure, the stories find the narrator admitting, "I haven't always proved to be the shrewdest judge of human nature. My romances have left me with a recurring dream in which I'm slashing tires and the tires' blood is spilling out." Throughout the fiction, blood ties are tenuous, commitment is provisional, and fate is arbitrary: "She packed her things and headed west, and when she hit the ocean and could go no further she tossed a coin and made a right-hand turn." Thus do so many of the characters in these stories find themselves in the area around the Puget Sound, which more often seems a last ditch than a last chance. These are characters with grit and survival instincts, but ones who ask, "What was sadness, after all, but the fibrous stuff out of which a life was woven? And what was happiness but a chemical in the brain?" Emotionally unflinching stories of considerable power, wonder and humor.
A stunning debut from an award-winning poet
Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo's story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them-and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter's badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister's sexual exploits and her aging mother's fantasies of revenge. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we mark the boundaries between these two zones. What's funny, what's heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?
A stunning debut from an award-winning poet
Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo's story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them-and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter's badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister's sexual exploits and her aging mother's fantasies of revenge. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we mark the boundaries between these two zones. What's funny, what's heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?
Editorial Reviews
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169900231 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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