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Overview
Enter into the worlds of fifteen young women who, despite their vastly different circumstances, seem to negotiate an eerily similar and unavoidably dangerous emotional terrain. With a visceral bite or a surreal edge, each electrically charged story in Circling the Drain presents women trying to understand the nature of loss—of leaving or being left—and discovering that in the throes of feverish conflict, things are rarely what they seem. By turns dark and lyrical, ferocious and playful, these stories are precise, startling, and undeniably original. Reading them is a cathartic, mesmerizing literary experience.
Synopsis
Enter into the worlds of fifteen young women who, despite their vastly different circumstances, seem to negotiate an eerily similar and unavoidably dangerous emotional terrain. With a visceral bite or a surreal edge, each electrically charged story in Circling the Drain presents women trying to understand the nature of loss—of leaving or being left—and discovering that in the throes of feverish conflict, things are rarely what they seem. By turns dark and lyrical, ferocious and playful, these stories are precise, startling, and undeniably original. Reading them is a cathartic, mesmerizing literary experience.
The New York Times Book Review \ - Mary Elizabeth Williams
Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically, about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, noirish sensibility...a well-guided tour of scarred souls who've witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them.
Editorials
New York Times Book Review
"A well-guided tour of scarred souls who’ve witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them."Chicago Tribune
"Mesmerizing . . . compelling . . . This collection, fresh, odd, and frightening, makes Davis a writer to watch."Chicago Tribune
“Mesmerizing . . . compelling . . . This collection, fresh, odd, and frightening, makes Davis a writer to watch.”New York Times Book Review
“A well-guided tour of scarred souls who’ve witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them.”Mary Elizabeth Williams
Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically, about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, noirish sensibility...a well-guided tour of scarred souls who've witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them.— The New York Times Book Review \
Williams Mary Elizabeth
Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically, about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, noirish sensibility...a well-guided tour of scarred souls who've witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them. —The New York Times Book ReviewVillage Voice
Magical...it's amazing how deep Davis's stories run. She creates women with hearts so big they can barely see the faults of the men standing in front of them. Inside Davis's tightly sketched women's world...girls, in the face of love, are tragicomically powerless. It's their willingness to be vulnerable that makes them heroines.Polly Morrice
In her debut collection of short fiction, Amanda Davis is unafraid to tinker with the form. The 15 stories in Circling the Drain include the autobiographical pieces you might expect from a young writer (Davis is 28), but they also range into the less traveled territories of revenge fantasy and whimsy. At times, the aim seems mainly to experiment with language.
Despite their varying structures, most of Davis' stories have common themes. They concern women who are unlucky in love, or are about to lose something else that is precious -- a sibling, an emotional connection, a sense of self-worth. The heroine of "Prints," which won Story magazine's annual "short-short" contest in 1997, still grieves over her older sister's disappearance 20 years earlier even as she at last comprehends how it happened. In the title piece, a clerical worker falls for an actor and follows him to New York, abandoning "the flat Midwestern landscape of her life." Stunned by his casual betrayal, she responds with a desperate act. The angel that subsequently looms over her hospital bed may or may not be real, but it certainly embodies the author's attraction to the supernatural.
So does "Testimony," in which a young woman named Erin is convinced that her late brother Jack could channel the voice of God. Her account of Jack's short, tormented life is peppered with e-mails from believers in an impending apocalypse: "The time of the Messiah IS AT HAND," writes one. Erin seems to accept these pronouncements at face value, but I was less clear about what to think. Is Erin merely "looking for someone to tell you what to do, to replace your brother," as her psychologist suggests, or should we take her insights seriously? The story is among the longest in the collection and contains no hint of irony -- signs that Davis thinks her heroine might just be on to something.
It is in her six experimental efforts that Davis strives hardest for poetic prose. One of them, "Sticks and Stones," traces the love affair between a woman named Charity, and Dingo, who works at the shoe-rental counter in a bowling alley -- he's a "a tall slick daddy, a hunk of boyish charm who could call a shoe size from across the room." These stories command attention for their verbal riffs but don't engage you as fully as the more conventional works. The strongest of them may be "The Visit," a skillfully handled account of the effects of Alzheimer's on family dynamics.
In the final selection, "Faith: or Tips for the Successful Young Lady," Davis pairs her affinity for voices and visions with the realities of high school. The slimmed-down narrator, whose dieting was induced by a suicide attempt, sees and hears her former fat self urging her to strike at those who drove her into misery. The concept is at least as old as "Carrie" (and as recent as Littleton), yet this take on the perils of high school for fat girls and other misfits seems just about right.
If the details sometimes seem drawn from movies rather than from life (the young woman in "Circling the Drain" arrives in New York via Greyhound bus -- don't all Midwesterners?), Davis nevertheless displays a marked gift for immediacy. In nearly all these stories, even those that exhibit the most self-conscious Creative Writing, things move right along. By combining her talent for narrative with her willingness to take risks -- and cutting some of the fancy wordplay -- Davis might really soar her next time out.
— Salon
Publishers Weekly -
Davis debuts with this often exciting but uneven collection of 15 stories, offering glimpses of women struggling, often in vain, against the magnetic pull of bad men and low self-esteem. At times Davis's prose displays an elegant acumen; elsewhere, it relies unconvincingly on social and literary conventions: "women [are] dormant until rescued by powerful strangers like the cowboy, who appeared to them with magic kisses... to wake them from their sleepy lives." Except that the cowboys are no heroes. Rather, they are con artists, arsonists, philanderers, and often absent. In one of the strongest stories, "Red Lights Like Laughter," a couple stuck in a hotel room during a blizzard seem ordinary until the violent tumult they are running from is revealed. Davis beautifully contrasts the freezing weather and the stuffy, shabby room with the narrator's conflicting emotions for her charming, murderous boyfriend. In "The Very Moment They're About," a sliver of time is cherished on the last night of camp as a teenage couple experience the fading moments of their childish innocence. Davis can aptly illuminate the mysterious connection between men and women, but she also tends to resort to the clich of the woman scorned. In the title story, a woman finds her actor boyfriend in bed with a man, so she jumps off the Williamsburg Bridge, because "there was nowhere to go," a sentiment that resurfaces often. Most of the female narrators are frustratingly dependent on controlling men who remain inscrutable to the reader. "Chase" is a self-conscious, overwrought fable about a girl who kills a boy's horse to redirect his love to herself. "Faith, or Tips for the Successful Young Lady," however, is a magnificently haunting tale, interspersed with Miss Manners-type guidance, about a formerly overweight teenager who cannot eradicate her demons until the image of her former self stops (literally) following her around. This story showcases Davis's talent, holding out promises of an interesting career for this new author once she settles into a stronger, more confident literary voice.Library Journal
In this dark debut collection of stories about young women suffering loss and alienation, Davis frequently employs the techniques of surrealism and magic realism. But even in the more realistic tales, her characters behave in such an extreme manner that the reader's sympathy may be hard to reach. In too many of the stories, a woman whose lover has left her becomes suicidal or imprisons herself in her apartment for several days, forgetting to bathe. In "Sticks and Stones," a woman falls in love with a shoe fetishist, and in "Tips for the Successful Young Lady" a desperately unhappy high schooler is literally haunted by her former fat self. While Davis has a nice touch with imagery, extraneous words and sloppy construction undermine her prose. More careful editing would have resulted in a stronger voice. Though there is much potential here, only comprehensive collections need purchase.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Mary Elizabeth Williams
Amanda Davis writes gently, even poetically, about extraordinary brutality. She has a distinctively creepy, noirish sensibility...a well-guided tour of scarred souls who've witnessed terrible things, and surprisingly, found odd bits of beauty in them.— The New York Times Book Review
Eve Claxton
This is a collection of stories in which all the protagonists are young women without extracting some kind of statement on what it means to be a woman finding her way at the end of the century. Davis's stories repeat a central theme-her women ae helplessly drawn into destructive relationship with charismatic, problematic men and are left feeling either trapped or alone.— Time Out New York
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Davis delivers the stuff of good short stories: passionate writing, empathetic characters, themes of alienation and loss, and beautiful language that keeps stinging long after you read it.— New York