Interesting Women : Stories

Publishers Weekly

Although Lee has published one novel (Sarah Phillips) and one book of reportage (Russian Journal), she is best known for her frequently anthologized short stories infused with international glamour and a particular brand of American world-weariness. The 13 here are thematically unified, focusing on outsiders doubly estranged and often struggling to factor a sexual power play into the equation. The unnamed narrator of "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" is vacationing in the Caribbean with her young son and her Franco-Roman husband, who adores the tropics and assumes she does, too. "He doesn't seem to see that what gives strength to the spine of an American black woman... is a steely Protestant core... that in its absolutism is curiously cold and Nordic." Another American wife whose Milanese husband assumes she is traditional gives him a birthday present of an evening with two elegant and very young fancy women. The book takes its title from the musings of a woman vacationing in Thailand while her husband investigates mines in China. "Interesting women are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man." Reading Lee, you know you're in the presence of an author fully able to, as another narrator says, "picture an endless mazurka of former wives, husbands, lovers, children, and assorted hangers-on, not excepting au pairs, cleaning women and pets." The stories are full of tension sexual, material, racial. If they are less than perfectly realized, and if their glitter seems to fade from a distance, they still provide instant and sophisticated gratification. New York author appearances. (Apr. 16) Forecast: Lee's work is frequently published in the New Yorker and other high-profile venues, and readers already captivated by her cool, ironic voice will be this collection's chief audience. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Interesting stories, too; several of them appeared in O. Henry Awards anthologies. Lee came to our attention some 20 years ago with Russian Journal. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Stories of transcontinental romance and displacement from New Yorker writer Lee (the novel Sarah Phillips, not reviewed). As befits its title, Lee's collection is filled to bursting with interesting women: "Interesting women-are we ever going to be free of them? I meet them everywhere these days, now that there is no longer such a thing as an interesting man." So opens the title story, as a mother vacationing at a beachside hotel in Thailand with her 12-year-old daughter meets up with one such woman. She's a fiftysomething divorced adventuress who calls herself Silver (apparently among other names). The story is little more than the mother's burgeoning fascination with Silver's wayward manners and aloof disdain for conventionality, but it's an engaging read nonetheless. There are rarely conclusions in Lee's tales, which tend to float away on a single, crystallized moment. Her protagonists on the whole are frightfully well-educated, high-bred American women abroad, with maybe a fashionable child or two and a European husband-Italian, usually, and almost always wealthy. A pair of stories, "The Birthday Party" and "About Fog and Cappuccino," feature interesting women of this sort to whom nothing terribly interesting happens-not a bad thing, since Lee easily enthralls with the smallest description or observation, and her knowledge of this lifestyle is intoxicatingly thorough. But just when you've had about enough of Americans just a bit too impressed with how well they've adopted Italian customs, she throws out a curveball like "The Golden Chariot," a theatrical reminiscence of an African-American family's cross-country vacation ca. 1962, or "Anthropology," in which a journalist is excoriatedby her cousin for an article she wrote on the customs of the remote North Carolina community their family hailed from. As arch as the lives depicted here are, Lee's pinpoint accuracy for the right word and perfect tone bring a universal truth to these stories about the-well, the more interesting sex.