Transgressions: Stories

Publishers Weekly

Veteran novelist Bingham (Straight Man) displays her solid command of narrative as well as her unique voice in an impressive collection of short fiction that finds aging men and women in a variety of erotic and romantic scenarios. The range is noteworthy: "Apricots" features an older professor jarring fruit with one of her charges, a college student who proceeds to seduce her after outlining her shortcomings in the class he attended, while "Benjamin" focuses on the cheeky, lecherous antics of a famous 90-year-old artist who takes his final stab at youth by trying to bed a series of attractive young girls. "Loving" tells the story of an older couple's plan to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to sea caves on Crete, where the husband long ago had a tryst with a girl from Cincinnati. In "A Remarkably Pretty Girl," a young, recently divorced woman walking home after a one-night stand sees her entire future unfold before her in a hopeful, exuberant vision: "Eventually, there would be even more children Eventually, it would begin to seem unlikely that anyone, even a hairdresser had ever called her a remarkably pretty girl. And then she would begin to live." "Rat," in contrast, finds a woman regretting an adventurous affair after her lover gets sick and she feels obligated to help with his ongoing care. Bingham explores the unexpected and sometimes disconcerting underside of experience in these pages, revealing an admirable gift for subtlety and understatement. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Paula Fox

"Each of these fine, subtle stories begins with something a bit larger than a mustard seed—an apricot, a splinter in an old woman's foot, a pump, cherries, a vegetarian setting out on a deer hunt—and ends with a revelation of some aspect of the human landscape. Ms. Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."

Phillip Lopate

"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom. In Transgressions, nothing can be counted on, except the persistence of authorial insight and intelligence."

Robin Morgan

"Sallie Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it. This is a wise and lovely collection."

Library Journal

This collection of 11 short stories focuses mostly on the lives of women at different ages, stages, and conditions of life. The stories all concern the minutiae of relationships: what works and what doesn't, what concessions are made for love, what lines are drawn for self-preservation, the hopeful and the hopeless. From the 63-year-old college teacher canning apricots with a 20-year old student to a woman fulfilling her partner's fantasy life, the stories vary in content but are uniformly well written; all of them convey a sense of personal growth. The author of several novels (e.g., Small Victories), two collections of short stories, and a memoir, Bingham crafts characters who are sympathetic and believable, and her insightful descriptions paint clear pictures in the mind, evoking feelings of familiarity. Recommended for all general literature collections.-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Eleven tales in a third collection from veteran small-press author Bingham (Straight Man, 1996, etc.) The central theme here is expressed by the protagonist of "The Big Bed": "Liz wanted, the summer she turned sixty-four, to pass through unconditional love . . . to what appeared to be its inevitable other side: transgression." Transgression, for Liz, amounts to arranging a threesome for her wanderer-lover in the misguided hope that she can keep him. But that's not the first one. The first transgression comes in "Apricots," when an aging college instructor finds herself, by her own design, jamming fruit alongside one of her students, a young man with tanned hands who is quite familiar with the sexual nature of the scenario. In "Benjamin," an aging painter, languorous in fame and conceit, attends the unveiling of a signature work and meets a young woman-another transgression-who will reveal both his weakness and what strength he has left. An aging momma's boy's ("Stanley") failure to outgrow the social conventions of the schoolyard leads to awkwardness on a date (a failure to transgress), which in turn leads to a pathological fascination with the woman who seems, awfully, to be perfect for him. The final piece ("The Splinter") is a quiet story about another older woman who finds herself alone with another young man, gay this time and in for the equivalent of a foot-washing ceremony and discussion of the fickleness of men and the fleeting nature of human relations. Other tales are about a woman who decides to leave an ill lover ("Rat") and a husband who tells a wife about a long-lost love in a cave in Crete ("Loving"). Bingham's career is in its fifth decade; perhaps this accounts for Liz'sconclusion that "For what, after all . . . is the use of age if it doesn't bring us to courage?" Stylistically rooted in the conventional, probing at the transgressive.