Elizabeth Tallent

Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent is a very highly recommended collection of ten short stories.

The stories capture relationships and lives during times of transformation with clarity and insight into the complicated emotional landscape of all relationships. Tallent explores relationships between genders, with an emphasis on female relationships, as well as broken marriages. Many of the stories deal with creative people, writers, artists, or ecological/environmental activists. Several are show more set on university campuses or have a tie in to academia. Almost all of the stories involve exes, severed relationships, struggling relationships. The emotions run high as we hear the inner thoughts of the characters struggling to make sense of their lives, actions, obsessions, and circumstances. Tallent describes lives that are messy, with emotional fallout and struggles.

All of these stories are extremely well written with exceptionally descriptive prose and phrasing. There are several passages I marked to take note of in my advanced reading copy. Tallent manages to capture the inner thoughts of her characters and their feelings with a clarity of emotion that is complete and realistic, but with a poetic grace and beauty of wording that often belies the raw emotions being expressed.

I don't know if the page numbers will be similar, but the acuity and mental pictures drawn from some of her descriptions is astonishing. For example: "Tamped down love means not only sublimated energy but also a ranting, pointless impatience: before long, she's sick of obsession's two-lane Nebraska highway." (pg 79)
Or: "It can't be true that she can't see in. That she can't know the story. This is her life she's been shut out of!"(pg. 97) And on the next page "Divorce is not linear. One morning there is peace of mind, the next there is wrath."

Contents include:
The Wrong Son - a young man in a working-class California fishing community has a complicated, combative relationship with his father
Tabriza - a man wonders if a valuable rug he dug out of the trash is evil and wreaking havoc on his third marriage
Mystery Caller - a woman places calls to her first husband but doesn't actually talk to him
Eros 101 - an female professor is obsessed/in love with her female student
Nobody You Know - recently divorced woman travels halfway across the country and meets her ex's new, young wife
The Wilderness - musings of an English professor
Never Come Back - parents have their son's pregnant girlfriend and subsequent grandchild continue to live with them after the girlfriend takes off
Mendocino Fire - a young eco-activist grows up in an unconventional manner
Narrator - a young female writer falls for an older famous male writer
Briar Switch - a woman's father is dying from lung cancer and she's has to drive through a blizzard to get to him

Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from Harper Collins and TLC for review purposes. show less

A collection of stories, some interconnected, about broken and patched families and the rich, internal lives of people we think we know. The author's voice is strong and kind - narrating each story without judgement. I felt close to the characters and came away with a renewed sense of the complexity of life.

Got about 1/3, skipped to the title story, stopped. Boring. People I don't care about, that I get the impression Tallent doesn't care about... they're stand-ins for the emotions they're supposedly feeling, the decisions they're supposedly making. They're icons. I agree with other reviewers that some of the writing is beautiful, but that's not enough to carry me through so much depressing minutiae, so many blah people committing petty acts of selfish disregard.

Elizabeth Tallent's third short story collection is filled with insecure men, even more insecure women, and the children that alternately solder them together and blast them apart. Honey is a book devoted to those moments that we spend teetering on the border between sanity and insanity, attempting to appear firm and decisive while inwardly pondering the ultimate leap into the unknown.

Full review: http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/reviews/tallent.cfm