Reviews
"Short and
sweet and to the point, the seven stories in this promising debut
collection exuberantly explore the relationships that make life
bearable. In a rueful examination of brother/sister love, "The
Language Event," set at the Indy 500, manages to be rowdy and
exquisitely wistful at the same time. Moore strikes another significant
chord in "Big Pink and Little Minkie," conjuring magic by
exploring the tenuous but often poignant truths to be gleaned from the
mundane commuter experience. She hits the ball out of the park with the
near novella-length "A History of Pandas," a flawless exercise
in characterization. This sharp portrayal of sisterhood sings, as the
narrator, called Sweet Pea, examines the root of her boundless adoration
of her sibling Lydia, a preschool teacher whose early widowhood has
forged a bond between the two that time can not diminish. In
"Rembrandt's Bones," a professor of art history deals with two
simultaneous deaths a student's suicide and the natural death of
sugar-loving Opal, a childhood mentor who taught her to love words and
always to appreciate the unexpected. Revealing a spiritual kinship with
Lewis Nordan, Moore writes matter-of-fact yet outlandish sentences that
read like tiny novels "Opal's Cousin Alma was married to my second
cousin J.W. and when J.W. died, Alma showed up at the funeral with a
lady-pink pistol and shot him five times in his open coffin before they
could get the gun away from her. They couldn't figure out what to charge
her with." Although all of the female narrators speak with nearly
the same wry and self-aware voice, readers will enjoy this buoyant
collection."
--Publishers Weekly
" This short
story collection is long on appeal and certain to
make great reading now that the days are getting shorter…. A
Compendium of Skirts: Stories by Phyllis Moore (Carroll & Graf, $23)
is a moving and wise
portrait of contemporary life. In the title story,
rather than trying to explain the intricacies of female conversation
with New Age symbols or pop psychobabble, Moore writes: "There
was the Everything Means Something Else conversation, the You've
Gotta Do What's Right for You conversation, and the Man Has Not Progressed
an Inch Since Lascaux conversation. In
The Hartford Courant, Helen Ubinas comments: "Moore's writing has
been described as short,
sweet and to the point. But her writing is also
witty and self aware and as funny as hell." Consider this passage
from the story entitled
Rembrandt's Bones: "Opal's Cousin Alma was married
to my second cousin J.W. and when J.W. died, Alma showed up at the
funeral with a lady-pink pistol and shot him five times in is open
coffin before they could
get the gun away from her. They couldn't figure
out what to charge her with."
Another
paragraph from a narrator who examines the relationship with the
sister she idolizes: "I have cleaned this apartment within an inch
of its life and it knows
it--sheets ironed and lavendered, the spices alphabetized.
Compared to me, Martha Stewart is a ten-dollar crack whore
passed out on a cold kitchen floor strewn with dirty, if cleverly
crocheted syringes. Last night, as I made the inspection tour,
room by room, the furniture cowered in fear."
Big Pink and
Little Minkie takes readers into the world of a group of bus
commuters--and it is magical! One of the passengers is Mother Man,
so named because of the
words he shouts out suddenly from time to time.
And then there's Boyfriend Historian; her cell phone conversations
have engulfed her fellow passengers into her life and boyfriend
troubles. Moore writes: "Her mother hated Simon, and after a
few months we began to
hate Simon too. But now she has met Larry and Larry
seems to be an outstanding individual. We on the bus are grateful
to Larry and hope, in fact, he marries the chatty say-nothing and
takes her home to Toronto or some such place, anywhere the number
147 does not run."
Ubinas
goes on to say, "There are writers who write beautifully, and
others who write clearly,
if a bit dryly, of important things. Moore, however,
blends humor, eccentric relationships and mischievous plot turns
in a beautifully written collection that talks, among many things,
of friendship, family and neurosis. Her details and characterizations
make it impossible to read a page without underlining
just about every sentence, or earmarking every corner."
--Publishers
Weekly Daily
Reviews in the News (Judi Baxter)
"Stories that'll excite the lapel-grabbers"
'Nobody runs up to you in the
hall and tells you, 'You gotta read this! You gotta read
this!'"says a female college teacher in Phyllis Moore's A
Compendium of Skirts , annoyed to the max by the bloodless acadamese of
"well put, insightful." Well, spare me the running, but it's
been a long time since a story collection had me grabbing people's
lapels like this one. It's worth paying a few friends' cleaning bills to
spread the word.
Long anticipated in Chicago
academic circles (Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute),
Skirts is one of those books that boasts such an endearingly original
voice, we derive entirely new insights and sensations from places we
think we've been and characters we think we've seen. The author, who
left her heart in Tallahassee, is both Southern eccentric and Northern
neurotic, pixillated and pent-up. Slyly, self-effacingly, bravely,
charmingly, she breaks your heart even as she cracks you up with her
tales of hopeless self-improvement.
A recurring theme in Skirts
is the struggle to measure up--or, in the case of love affairs with
dimly lit but attentive men ("I like him because he listens all the
way to the end of my sentences"), the guilty pleasures of measuring
down. One of Moore's largely interchangeable female protagonists is
dragged on a whirlwind tour of Europe by an impetuous girlfriend, in a
story that connivingly begins, "Once, in Hamburg, Daralynn
prevented us from getting kidnapped and worse by three giant Turks.
Lucky for us we had the peanut butter."
Another character, attempting
a reunion with her estranged deadbeat brother against the backdrop of
Indianapolis 500 tail-gating has her nostalgia for their army brat past
and all hopes for renewed family ties washed away in a stream of
distaste. In the multipart "History of Pandas," an older
sister's triumph of perfect taste over her sibling's stunted living
style ("I have clothes; Lydia has outfits") helps her past
memories of the grisly murder of her Air Force lieutanant husband in
Taiwan.
This may sound like heavy
stuff. But one of Moore's triumphs is to keep such feathery streams of
consciousness swirling around the dark spots in the narratives that we
invest most in the lives that are being lived, not the lives that were
lost. Nary a drop of sentimentality gets spilled. Like the female North
Sider who lives vicariously through the exploits of two elderly,
aristocratically self-possessed Russian women she spies every day on the
147 bus, Moore can't collect enough details about her subjects to keep
their stories spinning.
A proud child of the '50s,
she is also a committed collector of pop culture, anchoring her values
in vintage television--"To Tell the Truth," "The Andy
Griffith Show" and old toothpaste commercials--while making steady,
disarming, brilliant use of wider-ranging references. One story runs a
gamut of Doris Day, George Jones, Fritz Lang and Franz Kafka, not to
mention that outspoken new punk band, "The New Christy
Menstruals."
Shredding any sense of
Southern reserve, Moore uses obscenities to uproarious effect. It's too
bad I can't reprint her unique extension of the word
"unbelievable," into which she inserts an expletive to express
delight over an unexpected taste sensation. I also wish there were more
room here to impart a feel for her comic timing--her payoffs can't be
appreciated out of context. Take my word for it: She's a stitch. Take my
word for it again: You gotta read Skirts"
--Chicago Sun Times
"On a long commute,
over a cup of coffee on Saturday morning or curled up in front of the
fireplace on a chilly October night, short stories make a wonderful
companion. Two new collections give readers a wide choice of characters
and voices.
"Nobody
runs up to you in the hall and tells you, 'You gotta read this! You
gotta read this!' " says a female college teacher in Phyllis
Moore's A Compendium of Skirts (Carroll & Graf, $24). "Well,
spare me the running," says Lloyd Sachs in the Chicago Sun-Times,
"but it's been a long time since a story collection had me grabbing
people's lapels like this one. It's worth paying a few friends' cleaning
bills to spread the word."
The
recurring themes in these seven stories are the struggle to measure up
and the exploration of relationships that make life bearable for us.
Little gems like this one from "Rembrandt's Bones" tend to
evoke audible laughter from the reader: "Opal's Cousin Alma was
married to my second cousin J.W. and when J.W. died, Alma showed up at
the funeral with a lady-pink pistol and shot him five times in his open
coffin before they could get the gun away from her. They couldn't figure
out what to charge her with."
In
"Big Pink and Little Minkie," she writes of tenuous but
poignant truths gleaned by a female North Sider who lives vicariously
through the exploits of two elderly but aristocratic Russian women she
watches every day on the 147 bus. In "History of Pandas," a
woman whose Air Force husband has been murdered in Taiwan triumphs over
her younger sister's lifestyle by grooming her own perfect taste
("I have clothes; Lydia has outfits").
Sachs
concludes: "Shredding any sense of Southern reserve, Moore uses
obscenities to uproarious effect. It's too bad I can't reprint her
unique extension of the word 'unbelievable,' into which she inserts an
expletive to express delight over an unexpected taste sensation. I also
wish there were more room here to impart a feel for her comic
timing--her payoffs can't be appreciated out of context. Take my word
for it: She's a stitch. Take my word for it again: You gotta read
Skirts."
--PW Daily October 24, 2002
Reviews in the News: Skirts at Home and Abroad
"Moore exhibits a
writing style reminiscent of 1960s rebel fiction that is often
simultaneously cynical and ingenuous. In "The Language Event,"
for instance, Mary Louise goes to Indianapolis to reunite with her
brother Richard, who lives in a camper with his friend, Chit. Moore
evokes the past in both language and situation when she observes of the
camper, "[They] had gone in on it together. They pooled their
money, their carburetor skills When it was all fixed up and running,
they painted it pink." Her colorful descriptions also evoke vivid
mental pictures."
--Library
Journal
Full Description
A
refreshing blend of sensibilities marks this beautifully written and
immediately accessible collection as something special. From the
perspective of mostly single female protagonists, the stories in A
Compendium of Skirts feature all kinds of characters, all of whom are
grappling with universal matters of the heart, mind, and soul. In
"The Language Event" an estranged brother and sister organize
a reunion in which they awkwardly try to forge a new relationship.
"Once, in Hamburg" is a rumination on friendship and the
devotion, love, and loyalty that save two young women from themselves.
In "Rembrandt’s Bones," an art history teacher struggles to
cope with both the suicide of one of her students, a quiet girl who sat
in the back of the room and preferred a beat-up copy of The Idiot to the
assigned text, and the sudden death of her favorite aunt, a woman who
wore pink slacks, read Camus with a passion, and believed in the power
of sugar. And in the title story, a group of women friends sits around
the kitchen table and ponder life, love, and memories—perhaps real,
perhaps imagined. These stories and others come together in a moving and
wise portrait of contemporary life.
World
Rights: Contact Carroll & Graf
Dramatic Rights:
Contact Lukeman
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