The Boys of My Youth

February 2, 1998
Moments of profundity abut glimpses of life at its most mundane in this vividly realized collage of episodes from the author's life. The 12 personal narratives collected here, five of which are reprinted from magazines, unfold more thematically than chronologically. "Cousins," for example, explores kinship and female bonding, while the title piece confronts the difficulties and pleasures of women's relationships with men. This scheme allows freelance writer Beard to juxtapose childhood episodes with scenes from her adult life in a manner that illustrates how our past experiences continually inform our interpretations of similar situations later in life. An ongoing concern of this collection is the way people establish connections and how these connections are broken through divorce, death and other forms of separation; themes like the endurance of friendship and kinship are also explored. Beard's self-scrutiny is painstaking and free of self-absorption, and her keen eye for details grounds each episode in its historical moment.

February 1, 1998
These 12 autobiographical sketches are linked by the theme of romance and the au-thor's painful disillusionment with it. One story, "The Fourth State of Matter," selected for The New Yorker's 1996 fiction issue (June 24/July 1), tells how the author happened to escape a co-worker's fatal shooting spree. With a remarkable eye for detail and the past, Beard writes of her earliest memory, a childhood attachment to a doll named Hal, Barbie dolls that didn't know what to do with Ken, eluding a would-be attacker on the highway, and her divorce from a husband who preferred to look at himself in the mirror than at her. Her conversational style puts the reader, for example, right on the handlebars of her sister's bicycle: "No. Yes. Around the corner, clipping a parked car. Sewer grate. Here comes the sewer grate. Hard to describe how skinny my legs are, except to say that one of them fit perfectly down the sewer grate." Beard's work has also appeared in Story and other publications. The current title will be of interest to public and academic libraries.--Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C.

February 1, 1998
Among the more appealing things about this first collection of stories is its assured exploration of voice. These mostly first-person narrators show flashes of humor and vigor, as with the young narrator of "Bonanza," who explains that "part of the joy of whistling was knowing it was always available, you carried the equipment right on your face." But here and elsewhere the narrator's emerging declarativeness confronts uncertainties and loss, especially in the form of death. And, interestingly, it is the interpolation of the dying or dead one's voice in the narrative that provides a means for managing loss. At the end of "Waiting," the mourning narrator's disorientation at the wake with the figure of her mother's dead hands and the silence of the mourners "gives way . . . to the empty air that says You girls, you girls." And in "The Fourth State of Matter," the narrator embroiled in "the dying game" with her suffering collie gets relief from the enveloping silence after her colleague's brutal murder, with the remembered sound of his voice, "Exactly." ((Reviewed February 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)