Books Quarterly: Short Reviews

Spinners

by Anthony McCarten (Morrow, $24)

Teenagers invent all sorts of fantastic stories to disguise their follies, but Delia Chapman trumps an entire generation of fibbers in her role as the protagonist in Spinners. A 16-year-old who works in the meat-packing plant that's the largest employer in her depressed New Zealand town, she turns up one night in a total daze; delivered into the compassionate arms of the one-man police force, Delia speaks of an alien abduction. The story leaks out through the sheriff's loose-lipped wife and sets the town abuzz, but the gossip grows to a roar when it's announced that Delia and two of her peers from the plant are pregnant—and each claims that they've never had sex, at least not with a human. While the parents and local authorities attempt to unmask the rogue who must have ravaged these girls, and while some delight in the sensationalism of an alien gang-bang, two men search for the truth. There's newcomer Phillip, a comely and philosophical but troubled young man brought in by his uncle, the mayor, to reopen the decrepit library; and Vic, a big-city journalist who becomes personally entwined in a hopelessly unlikely scenario he helped validate. Author Anthony McCarten, a successful New Zea-land playwright, displays a deft touch in his debut as a novelist. He develops the plot as a comedic mystery, making Delia's ridiculous alibi seem plausible at times, and he animates an ambitious collection of characters as he leads this marvelous book to its mildly surprising end.

Richard A. Martin

Equipoise

by Kathleen Halme (Sarabande, $12.95)

In the work of Bellingham poet Kathleen Halme, a solitary spirit addresses a world not always in the mood for conversation. Even when events seem more responsive to human wishes, a perfect communion proves impossible—words that go between also stand between. But the poems keep pushing against the nature of things, pressing toward pure, unmediated experience, a union of self and surroundings that words can't achieve.

In Halme's prize-winning first book, Every Substance Clothed (University of Georgia), the pursuit of a fusion admitted to be impossible is tragic, cryptic, antic, athletic—is interesting in the vexed and prickly erotics of its moves. The speakers of the poems accost experience and language, survive their stoniness, and swing the reader between vision and question, pother and calm. Equipoise shares the concerns of the earlier book, but feels a bit lighter in weight and less piercing in intelligence, its metaphors tending toward the fluid and flowery instead of edges and iron. One wishes the new poems had harder work to do, and more art in lines that feel either thin or clotted. Still, there are many sharply observed moments: "pelicans/like folding chairs" ("Betwixt the Flames and Waves"), "the next table of men/who snap the news from page to page" ("In M鲩da, Capital of Yucatᮢ), "love/alive astride lighthouse and gray scarf of horizon" ("Knots"), and the sexy, child-free woman sassing mothers who nag her to reproduce ("Autotomy"). Equipoise is most admirable when precariously achieved in the midst of trouble.

Judy Lightfoot

On the Loose: Big City Days and Nights of Three Single Women

by Melissa Roth (William Morrow, $23)

When reading becomes more of an opportunity to learn the lurid details of real people's lives than a self-edifying pastime, that's when we resign ourselves to vicarious pleasures. Thankfully, in her new book, On the Loose, in which she tracks three swingin' single women from LA, New York, and San Francisco for an entire year, first-time author Melissa Roth has the foresight to change her subjects' names, because wow, these gals certainly are going to need all the anonymity they can muster in order to live down kissing, screwing, screwing some more, and telling. Jen, a Hollywood-studio type, yearns for her older sister's stable marriage, but knows all men in LA don't want to get in her pants—they want to get in her Rolodex. Anna, a soon-to-be-divorced ad exec in San Francisco, decides that all of straight San Francisco is taken, so sleeps with a guy she meets on business in Texas, "the bad cowboy." Turns out he's involved and has a child on the way. Casey works for a major record label in Manhattan and has a thing for ginseng and tantric sex.

In her introduction, Roth expresses genuine interest in how today's single woman gets along without marriage. She writes that "[These three women] have a healthy outlook on their single state." Unfortunately, Roth's earnest tracking of her three subjects gets totally contradicted and, ultimately, lost in Jen's, Anna's, and Casey's escapades. And we're not talking just a few flings: Each woman exhibits a high frequency for attracting the same losers she knows won't ever treat her well. It's as if Ally McBeal herself came in and sucked their low-cal brains right out of their heads. So much for their glamorous jobs, interesting female friends, and frequent-flier getaways.

The saddest part of this read—don't get me wrong, it's easygoing and fluffy, like a trashy novel—was that none of these women evolve beyond rampant boy-craziness. Sure, we're not getting their full stories, but gee, is sex the only plot thickener in singlehood these days? If anything, Roth has succeeded in making settling down all the more attractive.