IN ADDITION TO the novel Two Serious Ladies (see LLL for May 10, 2024) and the play In the Summer House, Jane Bowles published this volume of short stories. It appeared in 1966.
Anyone who enjoyed Two Serious Ladies would enjoy the short stories as well, I predict. They are in the same dry, deadpan voice, and the two longest of the stories, each about forty pages, strike one as near kin to Bowles’s 1943 novel. “A Guatemalan Idyll” seems to take place within a stone’s throw of wherever Mrs. Copperfield is in the second chapter of Two Serious Ladies, and “Camp Cataract” seems like the kind of place Christina Goering might someday turn up.
In both “A Guatemalan Idyll” and “Camp Cataract” a female protagonist is mounting a serious effort to put some distance between herself and her family or to get out of the United States or both, and the same impulse appears in some of the other stories (e.g., “A Stick of Green Candy”). Perhaps the protagonists have lesbian inclinations that they realize cannot even be acknowledged or articulated, much less acted upon, within the confines of the family circle or the boundaries of the United States—hence the urgency of getting the hell out, if they can. But neither could those same inclinations be acknowledged or articulated in above-ground publication in the 1940s and 1950s, and this Great Looming Unsayable lends an enigmatic gravity to these stories that might otherwise seem like tales of shabby-genteel eccentrics. Bowles’s protagonists may give the impression of being scatter-brained and affected, but one also senses they are straining every nerve to save their own lives.
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