Overview
The inhabitants of Prose's Peaceable Kingdom are getting the surprises of their lives: a young woman on her honeymoon suddenly realizes that her ecologist husband will have to save the world without her; a child on a class trip recognizes in an Egyptian tomb the inevitable and tragic procession of her life to come; a young puppeteer works a party in the house of a wealthy family, only to be drawn into an encounter with the head of the dysfunctional household; and a disaffected girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress is chased by the boy of her dreams. Nothing is certain in this world where weddings and birthday parties go unpredictably awry, strangers blurt out disturbing confessions, and even the family pets reveal themselves to be agents of discord and disruption.
In this short-story collection by one of the most gifted fiction writers of our time, Francine Prose shows us how the seemingly tranquil surface of ordinary happiness barely conceals the darker, more mysterious and brutal truths about this deceptively peaceable kingdom.
Synopsis
The inhabitants of Prose's Peaceable Kingdom are getting the surprises of their lives: a young woman on her honeymoon suddenly realizes that her ecologist husband will have to save the world without her; a child on a class trip recognizes in an Egyptian tomb the inevitable and tragic procession of her life to come; a young puppeteer works a party in the house of a wealthy family, only to be drawn into an encounter with the head of the dysfunctional household; and a disaffected girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress is chased by the boy of her dreams. Nothing is certain in this world where weddings and birthday parties go unpredictably awry, strangers blurt out disturbing confessions, and even the family pets reveal themselves to be agents of discord and disruption.
In this short-story collection by one of the most gifted fiction writers of our time, Francine Prose shows us how the seemingly tranquil surface of ordinary happiness barely conceals the darker, more mysterious and brutal truths about this deceptively peaceable kingdom.
Publishers Weekly
Prose (Primitive People; Household Saints) is a highly talented writer who in this collection of stories--most of them previously published in little magazines--seems to be seeking a subject. They are mostly about young, fairly sophisticated people in a vaguely artistic milieu who are profoundly at odds with each other and their world. Prose has a marvelous ear for the inanities of contemporary dialogue, and is continuously observant; there is never a time when she bores the reader or causes impatience, and she is often very funny. But readers will likely come away with little more than cool admiration for her intelligence and her rueful insights. In "Amazing,'' for instance, a young puppeteer does his work at a party in the house of a wealthy and clearly dysfunctional family, only to be drawn into an odd and not very convincing encounter with the father of the household; in "Potato World,'' a bright, disaffected girl on a trip to Paris with her father and his mistress is chased there by her hapless boyfriend, with disastrous results; "Rubber Life'' is a sort of ghost story about a librarian and her best customer that ends, as so many of these stories do, with a symbolist flourish that is effective in itself but seems unrelated to what has gone before. Read one at a time these stories would probably seem more hip and entertaining than they do as a collection, where their similarities and frequent glibness are more apparent.