05/22/2023
Most of the stories in this stylish collection from novelist Alcott (America Was Hard to Find ) follow women in upheaval. In “Part of the Country,” a wife ends a pregnancy much desired by her husband and moves alone to rural California, where her nights are disturbed by the “menacing” wailing of a dog. “Reputation Management” follows tech worker Alice, who scrubs the internet of negative references to her company’s clients. After Alice learns a pedophile has availed himself of her services, she has a crisis of conscience. In the title story, one of the strongest in the collection, a chorus of narrators tell the tale of their erstwhile neighbor, Helen, who decamps from New York City after a divorce; in Maine, her idyllic existence raising chickens and swimming in a local river is cut short after she violates a taboo. Another standout, “A World Without Men,” the only story to feature a male protagonist, involves 70-something husband-and-wife nightclub performers Frankie and Shirley, whose work is curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shirley assures Frankie they’ll be back at it soon, “Before you can say bored,” but before long they’re both struggling. Alcott’s prose is precise and evocative, and the plots are consistently tight. There’s much to enjoy. (July)
"The world falls away as Kathleen Alcott’s stories unfold in her sublime collection, Emergency . The smallest moment, the briefest description, the single telling detail are given the attention a stonecutter would give a gem. Alcott’s gift is breathtaking... These stories are lovely and tart and marvelously peculiar, the product of an interesting and interested mind."
Hudson Review - Louise Marburg
"Alcott twines financial and feminine anxieties to create particular women wondering who they are if they live like this. It is seductive to read about money when it is neither the obvious, suffocating focus nor shrouded in euphemism. It is arresting to read about this female experience of capitalism, where that impossible quest for identity includes the perhaps impossible calculation of social standing."
Cleveland Review of Books
"Skillfully wrought and possessed of an exquisite eye for detail, this marvel of a collection contains enough insight and wisdom to fill several books. Kathleen Alcott proves again that she is one of her generation’s sharpest and most gifted writers, with her hand over the beating heart of our complicated, crisis-ridden nation."
"'Anything can be lived around,' muses one of Alcott’s arresting narrators, 'so long as it’s only you who has to do it.'... We’d recommend reading this cunning collection with a pen in hand—you’re going to want to underline half the sentences."
Oprah Daily - Charley Burlock
"Deftly blending acerbic observations with tender admiration for the ways her protagonists must tackle contemporary challenges, Alcott brings an intense and unflinching presence to the worlds she creates."
"If Alcott has always been interested in how people bargain with forces bigger than them, then Emergency is about what happens when women bet against themselves; when women use their own autonomy as a bargaining chip in a wager that might gain them some power within a system inherently built against them. Whatever they might gain—Helen’s bourgeois life, Hannah’s coupled bliss—can never make up for what they’ve already given up."
"Alcott’s sentences are tightly constructed and indelible... As the best fiction does, Emergency refuses to offer simple diagnoses for today’s social and personal conditions... This is a book you must wade into, slowly immersing yourself in its murky and unsettling world."
"[A] richly layered collection... Alcott’s prose, both sensuous and cerebral, abounds with insight into people and the shapes life contorts them into."
"[Alcott's] sentences [have] startling aphoristic strength... The demanding directness of the writing scales up the sense of unfolding crisis... [A] high point in this impressive author’s evolution."
Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"Exquisite... Each of these seven stories—about unmoored women dealing with crises of identity, creeping despair, and the psychic wounds left by corrosive men—is a small marvel: intense, cerebral, and tender."
"I've long loved Kathleen Alcott's novels for her whip-smart voice and her taut prose. I was delighted to discover that her collection of short stories, Emergency , is also wonderful, spiny and wry and thrumming with subversive power."
"In supple, self-assured prose, Alcott highlights the ambivalence that can come with intimacy and violence, asking whether love is merely another form of circumscription, and whether brutality can sometimes be an antidote to numbness."
"Kathleen Alcott’s Emergency left me windswept and altered—this is a book that reveals to us our forgotten joys and secrets, all the unexpected paths of our days. There is an abundance of the world here, a bright, haunted pulse you want to follow endlessly. Alcott is a mesmerizing writer, and this is her best book yet."
★ 2023-05-09
Alcott’s protagonists are often beautiful, clever young women from economically impoverished backgrounds who wind up with men many years older and far richer. Estranged from their families of origin and never quite at home with their boyfriends and husbands, these women are ill at ease and even suicidal despite their intelligence and acquired grace, and they must struggle for self-acceptance and independence. In “Natural Light,” the narrator discovers a disturbing photo of her dead mother hanging in a museum, which her father refuses to explain. Separated from her husband, who can’t tolerate her darkness, the woman wonders whether she too might be exempt from answering questions about “who I was or how I suffered.” In “Part of the Country,” the narrator leaves her husband because she believes he likes weak women and only returns to him after she has proved her strength by hurting him. The best stories here are the first and last. In “Emergency,” a group of women who collectively narrate the story excoriates their friend Helen, whose life spirals downward after her rich husband leaves her. “You can’t say whore,” they comment about her “conquests,” “and we would never say whore—well, once we said whore—but you could say without qualms there was trouble.” “Temporary Housing,” which plumbs the deep ties between two self-destructive young women, offers searing commentary on how vulnerable women can be. “Maybe we aren’t girls,” the narrator reflects after learning her childhood friend is dead of an overdose, “surely we were never children, but we might have the talents of animals, sensing everything that wants to kill us, and that we need to kill.” Alcott’s prose is cerebral and knotty, but patience yields exquisite insights about women’s agency and the corrosiveness of male privilege.
Stories that are worth reading twice.
