The Tomcat's Wife and Other Stories

New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 209 pp. One-half inch repairable tear to fore edge of dj. Some dust speckling to top of page edges. Bone-white paper boards nearly pristine. Unread. From the flap: 'Like her essays, collected in the much-praised Letters from the Country. Carol Blv's stories are often about the fugitive state of sweetness and light in America today. Her typical protagonist is a responsible woman. adjusted to the narrowness of local life but trying to work in a little taste, aspiration, beauty, against the odds. For 'culture' comes in various ways these days to places like Clayton, Minnesota: some enhancing, some silly, some corrupt. The 'tender organizations' have to work like bandits to stay alive. // In the title story, Cheryl Hasted's good country sense is put to the test by the new art teacher, Mercein Gall, who taunts her conventional ideas ('Next you'll be telling me a psychotherapist doesn't see his women patients as women') while they drink whiskey in her car by the high-school football field and she sketches the graceful butts of the boys. ('In three or four years they will mostly be idiots. Makes your heart stop to think of it') Meanwhile, Cheryl's gullible husband is being swept off his feet by Tom Gall, the flashy school psychologist. Country mouse meets city tomcat in this study of sensitivity--natural, phony, foolish, sturdy, vitalizing, doomed--and of aggression, positive as well as negative. //In 'My lord Bag of Rice,' a woman who submits to her husband, a loutish mechanic, until the end uses her inheritance to buy a boardinghouse in Saint Paul where courtesy and kindness will be the rule. But Eleanor Grummel discovers that graciousness needs to be stoutly defended, that valor is the better part of virtue. //Bly talks her people's language and walks in their shoes like a latter-day Ring Lardner, whether they own the polluting Benty Chem in Saint Paul that is landscaped to look like an Englishman's estate or a furniture store in Agans that specializes in chairs that rest on authentic animal hooves. She satirizes the cant of the charismatic Christians, the dazed Lutherans, the uppity Episcopalians and warms to the efforts of residents in a nursing home to see justice done or of the gay director of the state Artmobile to give the community's imagination something to chew on. Like her essays, Carol Bly's stories are anything but detached. Instead they are fully attentive, written close to the bone of her anger and sympathy as well as being so much in touch with her characters' lives. Their moral intelligence will speak to you whether you live in Darien or forty miles west of Duluth.'. First Edition, First Printing. Quarter Cloth. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.