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Inside Madeleine (2014)

by Paula Bomer(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 6

ISBN

1616953098 (ISBN13: 9781616953096)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Soho Press

review 1: This is a very readable collection, and Bomer has something real to see about women and self-image and sex. In some ways her work can be compared to that of Mary Gaitskill in its hard-edged honesty, but I don't think she's as good or interesting a writer as Gaitskill. The stories were too much the same, down to the smallest details. I also noticed an off-putting number of grammatical errors (e.g., lay/lie confusion) that weren't in dialogue and didn't seem in keeping with the language overall. I was not in love with the book's title story.
review 2: I really disliked this collection of short stories. Often movies fall flat because the characters face simple problems that are tidily resolved, leaving a state of unrealistic bliss. These short stories suffered f... morerom a contradictory problem--everything was so bleak! By no means do I feel that fiction shouldn't be depressing. However, good fiction captures an essence about the complexity of life. "Madame Bovary", which I adore, is not exactly a cheerful read. But the pain of "Madame Bovary" is understandable, and helps us to understand the human conditions of the stifling oppression of mundane provincial life. By contrast, the stories of "Inside Madeline" do not capture this complexity; the protagonists suffer inveterate misery without the necessary characterization to explain why they are miserable. Each story is set in 1986 and focuses on essentially the same unhappy girl from South Bend, Indiana. In one of the stories the girl is living in Boston during a summer between her college years, and she's working at a home for mentally disturbed patients. The girl is troubled by the fact that her mother hates her, while she is close with her father. These relationships affect her ability to interact with others. While these family relationships are interesting, there is an utter absence of characterization to explain why. To make the reader care, or empathize, it's necessary to know more than the unsatisfactory statement that "the mother hates the daughter". The reader doesn't need the causes of the bad relationship explicitly spelled out (that would be artificially pat), but a nuanced suggestion is necessary. My final critique: this short story collection was so similar to "Blueprints for Building Better Girls" by Elissa Schappell, which I read recently, and also disliked. less

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