The men in Lily Tuck's new collection of stories, The House at Belle Fontaine, don't come off well. They drink too much, sleep with younger women, ignore their children and abuse their domestic help--but, mercifully for their wives, they also often die young.
The women in these stories, on the other hand, are largely self-aware, adventurous and stoic. They don't dwell on their own disappointing behavior or impulses, but, like the university student seduced and impregnated by her Greek professor in "Sure and Gentle Words," they take some pride in themselves "not merely as a wife and mother... but as someone with a past, someone who had had an adventure."
Tuck's fiction, including the 2004 National Book Award winner The News from Paraguay, is filled with strong worldly women who travel or live wherever they want--whether their men join them or not. Her work is elegantly concise, capturing intimacies and emotions with just a few words of description and telling dialogue.
In the same way that unsatisfactory sex and marriage dominate the stories of The House at Belle Fontaine, random fatal disease and accident destabilize the characters' relationships. The stories take place across the globe, but their settings don't change Tuck's focus on the vicissitudes of relationships between men and women--and in this she is a master. If her women usually come out on top, perhaps it's because they have figured it out better than men. As she notes in the story "Lucky," concerning one character and her former art teacher and ex-husband, "She had surprised herself and learned a lot from Alec. If only, she thinks, she had not married him." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.