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And Other Stories
Here, in the first collection of her short fiction, Robinson probes the pain and joy of raising children, the allure of illicit love, the ordeal of divorce, as well as more subtle events – the small but often exquisitely painful betrayals that litter the course of a life.
But in her world, grace too can be near at hand, and Robinson balances these harrowing portraits with stories that uncover the possibility of reunion and renewal – and moments of transcendent loveliness that promise, and deliver , “merely great delight.”
(Harpercollins, 1991; HarperPerennial, 1992)
From: The New York Times:
In the preface to his selected stories, John Cheever wrote that his own work seemed to portray “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”
Well, the hats are gone, as is Benny Goodman. But, in “A Glimpse of Scarlet,” Roxana Robinson’s stunning first collection of stories, there’s still that haunting river light: in the title story, the week before Labor Day in Manhattan is described as “a deep, dreaming moment. The air is hushed and motionless, sounds are close and intimate, the plants and trees are huge and luxuriant from the summer in the solar greenhouse of the city.”
It’s that pensive light, along with the grand assemblage of broken and mended lives in a world where East 70’s brownstones stay dark the entire summer and where air kisses are sometimes the sincerest form of love one can offer up, that makes clear Ms. Robinson may be John Cheever’s heir apparent.
Like Cheever, too, she doesn’t relegate her stories only to New York, but includes its branch campuses: the Hamptons, Greenwich, Conn, as well as elegant vacation sites abroad. There are the requisite indiscretions, the post-dinner party fights, the affairs both known and suspected.
As in her novel, “Summer Light,” – Ms. Robinson is also the author of “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life” – the core os these stories is the tenuous and frightening world of lost familial love and the equally shaky battle to forge it anew. “Graduation,” the story of a woman attending her son’s commencement at a Rhode Island boarding school, is infused with the terror she feels as having to face her former husband, his new wife and their baby. Filled with remorse at never having been able to conceive another child, she’s both heartened and mournful that her maternal love, “this blissful, legitimate, uncomplicated tide of love,” will be given to only one son. The son, however, is being manipulated by his father until, by the story’s end, even her anchor, the attention and love of her son, seems dislodged.
In “Night Vision,” Steven and Lisa, both in their second marriage, are en route to a Swiss ski vacation at Interlaken. It’s late, Steven is “rumpled, cold, tired,” but even through his exhaustion he manages to make clear in his own mind the nature of second marriages: “Their first marriages loomed, dangerous passages, in their adult lives. He had owned his first wife’s past, he knew her early loves, her childhood, and he had offered up his own. But he and Lisa each had a great failure behind them – there were things he could not bear to know about her, and things of his own he would rather not share.” Yet even in the face of a past best kept anonymous, there comes in the quiet of the night train a startlingly intimate admission of Lisa’s that reveals the true and sorrowful depth of the love she holds for him.
The uncertain invincibility of marriage is made most apparent in the title story: a happily married woman walking the tree-shaded East 70’s sees what she knows is the end of an afternoon tryst when a man in a gray suit leans into a darkened doorway for one last kiss. The woman sees inside the doorway only “a glimpse of something red, a violent color, vivid and hot.” From this small glimpse the narrator ponders the design of forbidden love, its perilous joy and freedom: “All that risk, the guilt, the danger, balanced against something so rich, so sumptuous, so imperative that he had no choice but to risk it all.”
Only after the witness herself turns down the opportunity to start up again with an old lover, and after it appears ther husband is on the brink of finding a lover of his own, does the specter of an affair and the “extremity, the secrecy, and the great violence of the pleasure” make itself known, fidelity finally prevailing in its own twisted blessing.
There are a few missteps here. “Second Chances,” about parental acceptance, relies too heavily on the metaphor of a homemade pie crust. And the story “Snowfall,” though it tries not to, reads like a politically correct apology for the stories of the landed gentry that will follow.
But these flaws seem insignificicant against the tremendous success of the other stories. I read them slowly, and then more slowly, finally allowing myself one story a night, the terrible weight of newly endangered and newly forged familial love so beautifully and profoundly rendered. Roxana Robinson’s first collection of stories is at once poignant and brutal, a book of New Yor stories filled with the bitter joys and tender sorrows of marriage and parenthood.
- Brett Lott. June, 1991
From: Time:
“Once people like these were the focus of Henry James and Edith Wharton: in recent years Louis Auchincloss and John Cheever have been their chroniclers. Robinson shows similar mastery of form, and she belongs in their august company.”
From: Library Journal:
“These stories of upper-middle-class family life concern relationships between men and women, mistrust and infidelities, broken families, and stepparents and stepchildren. With characteristic delicacy and empathy, Robinson probes the terrible emotional constrictions her characters suffer in such stories as "Handicapped," "The Time for Kissing," and "Tears Before Bedtime." Other stories trace the complexities of friendship and forgiveness and the devotion and resignation of old age. In the title story, a suspicious wife makes much of her husband's casual lunch date, recalling her own affair and that of a couple seen by chance on the street--in "a moment of widening freedom, possibility" implied merely by "a glimpse of scarlet" in the woman's scarf or sleeve. Robinson's stories have been published in The New Yorker , Atlantic , and Southern Review . She is also the author of the novel Summer Light ( LJ 6/1/88) and Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life ( LJ 9/15/89). A touchingly intimate, human collection.”
-Mary Soete, San Diego P.L.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From: Kirkus Reviews:
“Fourteen finely wrought and revealing stories about the not- so-gentle sting of WASP-y love, from novelist (Summer Light) and biographer (Georgia O'Keeffe) Robinson. In ``The Time for Kissing,'' a grown daughter, Susannah, sorts through images from her past in an effort to come to some sort of understanding with her willfully remote mother. Just as Susannah is ready to risk it--to try to cross old barricades of correctness-- her mother manages to rebuff her in a final, and desperately sad.”