The Lifeguard: Stories

by Mary Morris

Overview

The Lifeguard is a powerful collection of ten short stories that shows Mary Morris's great sensitivity to men and women at moments of turbulence, uncertainty, and crisis.

Morris's short story collection combines her consummate craft as a storyteller with her gift for dramatic travel writing. In the title story, a teenage lifeguard sees his mystique among the girls on the beach dissolve in a panicked moment when he cannot save a child. In "The Glass-Bottom Boat," a mother on her first trip abroad learns about trust from a solicitous stranger.

"A superb collection . . . A magnificent writer.” —The Washington Post Book World

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312186944
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/15/1998
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.45(d)
Lexile:	860L (what's this?)
Age Range:	3 Years

About the Author

Mary Morris is a novelist, short-story writer, and author of travel literature. Her many books include the novels Crossroads, The Waiting Room, and The Night Sky. She wrote the travel memoirs Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Artists Public Service Awards. She lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

1.	The Lifeguard	1
2.	The Wall	17
3.	Slice of Life	35
4.	The Lure	45
5.	Souvenirs	64
6.	The Snowmaker's Wife	83
7.	Around the World	105
8.	Losing Track	120
9.	The Moon Garden	136
10.	The Glass-Bottom Boat	157

Editorial Reviews

Mary Morris seems to have a microscope trained on the souls and hearts of mankind . . . A superb collection . . . A magnificent writer.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Dizzy with self-realization, Morris's characters venture out beyond the beach resorts to more compelling but often perilous territories.” —The Chicago Tribune

“These knowing, sometimes dark tales are about people struggling to connect with each other in spite of their own ambivalence.” —Glamour

“Mary Morris's compassion is on par with her sense of humor, a rare combination.” —Betsy Willeford, The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)

“The stories are quite disarmingly complex, while keeping up a surface appearance of clarity and straightforwardness . . . It's a fine book.” —Charles Baxter

“Ten subtle, impressionistic stories that linger and expand in the memory.” —Mademoiselle

“As a storyteller, Morris shines. Reading her best stories is like sinking into a good photograph. She packs them with tiny details, but never allows the particulars to interfere with the vision and balance of the whole.” —Julia Corbin, St. Petersburg Times

“A poised and articulate collection.” —Publishers Weekly

“Exquisitely revealing moments...clearly Morris hasn't lost her touch as a story writer.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Morris's ability to reincarnate her travel stories into fiction make for a well-rounded, fully formed body of work. It is also a pleasure to come upon a contemporary author who writes fiction and nonfiction equally well.” —Kristin Rose, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“What really unifies these stories is Morris's spartan approach to descriptive detail and her spare language. Instead of spoon-feeding her readers, Morris leaves much for them to infer.” —Marie Elsie St. Leger, Time Out New York

From the Publisher

After a 12-year hiatus, novelist and travel-writer Morris (Crossroads; The Waiting Room) returns to the form that earned the Rome Prize for her debut collection, Vanishing Animals. Although the 10 stories in the new volume are set in various locales, from a ski resort to the Caribbean, all focus on the quiet crises that can rock her mainly female protagonists' middle-class existences. In "Souvenirs," an adolescent girl is finally invited to accompany her parents on their annual trip to Florida. The unraveling of her illusions about her parents (and the way she acts out her disappointment) leads to a moving rite of passage. Marital stress, skillfully rendered, is the focus of several stories. In "The Wall," a second wife tries to erase the memory of her precursor by painting over the mural in their kitchena gift from her husband's first marriageand discovers the void at the center of their relationship. In "The Snowmaker's Wife,'' a woman finds solace in an Indian myth after she realizes that her husband is having an affair. The sole male protagonist, in the title story, also experiences his vulnerability, in a potentially tragic situation. As elsewhere in Morris's fiction, occasional intrusions of the symbolic (and even supernatural) are made to seem natural and necessary. This is less true in "Losing Track," in which a visit to the site of dinosaur tracks by the parents of a runaway girl is freighted with more symbolic weight than it can bear. Such flaws do not undermine this poised and articulate collection, however. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These stories by the author of House Arrest (LJ 4/1/96) offer a range of characters and circumstances, yet the tone and structure are always the same: a somewhat bewildered protagonist tries to deal with a situation, tension builds, actions and feelings are rationalized, and the story ends abruptly, with no satisfying denouement. Sometimes the tension is caused by supernatural forces, as in "The Wall," in which an indelible mural on a kitchen wall has a mystical effect on the narrator's husband. In other stories, the tension results from prosaic domestic drama. The most successful story, "The Glass-Bottom Boat," about a housewife on vacation with her family in Jamaica who encounters local residents with magical powers, melds the enigmatic and the commonplace. The uptight, contained lives of Morris's characters are mimicked by her compact, bland prose. For comprehensive modern fiction collections.Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y.

Library Journal

YAThese 10 short stories are stitched together with the common threads of personal crisis, change, and growth. All have straightforward plots and good character development. Three stories have particular appeal to YAs. In a first-person narrative, "The Lifeguard" describes sitting in his elevated chair, adored by all the young girls on the beach, and waiting for a crisis. When a toddler stops breathing, he tries everything he has been trained to do but nothing works. The child is saved by a divorce whose constant presence on the beach has both disturbed and intrigued the lifeguard. He is compelled to seek out this older woman who wordlessly embraces him and then sends him on his way. Told in retrospect and filled with precise detail, the story leaves readers to ponder how this experience influences his life. The hero of "Slices of Life" is a young pizza entrepreneur who has caring relationships with his girlfriend and his customers but not his ne'er-do-well father. In "Souvenirs," a girl begins shoplifting as she struggles with growing up and the changes that it brings. Several selections feature married women dealing with husbands and children. Some have supernatural elements. The stories are uneven in quality, but all are succinct and enjoyable. Each one ends with thought-provoking unresolved issues that are perfect for YA group discussion.Nancy Karst, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

School Library Journal

Morris's third collection (Vanishing Animals, 1975; The Bus of Dreams, 1985) shows some of the flair for yarnspinning missed in her last novel, House Arrest (1996), but repetition lessens the overall impact of the ten tales here (nine previously published).

Most of this volume's characters are poised on the cusp of a change, nowhere more so than in the title story, where a teenage lifeguard, accustomed to being the lord of all he surveys, has a rude awakening when he proves deficient in the first aid needed to save a toddler on the beach. But young male protagonists are an exception; much more common are married women (like Emily in "The Snowmaker's Wife") who learn something profound about the emptiness of their lives. Emily's husband spends his winter nights making snow at a ski resort, but when his nocturnal absences increase she begins to suspect something else; then her fear that he's stepping out with her best friend is verified at a time when she's most vulnerable. Melanie in "Losing Track," Lenore in "The Glass-Bottom Boat," and the unnamed cowboy's wife in "Around the World" all experience epiphanies when they go to the limit of what their husbands can do for them, then step beyond on their own: Melanie during an all-night vigil in Navaho land, Lenore on a Caribbean holiday when a native opens her eyes to a world she'd denied, and the cowgirl when the carnival comes along, bringing a handsome stranger to the laundromat. We don't learn what follows these personal revelations, but Morris's implication is that her characters' lives, if not completely transformed, will at least be easier to bear.

Longing and change are better personified in some situations than others here, and the marital dynamic grows stale. But there are also exquisitely revealing moments, and clearly Morris hasn't lost her touch as a story writer.

Kirkus Reviews