Transgressions

October 28, 2002
Veteran novelist Bingham (Straight Man) displays her solid command of narrative as well as her unique voice in an impressive collection of short fiction that finds aging men and women in a variety of erotic and romantic scenarios. The range is noteworthy: "Apricots" features an older professor jarring fruit with one of her charges, a college student who proceeds to seduce her after outlining her shortcomings in the class he attended, while "Benjamin" focuses on the cheeky, lecherous antics of a famous 90-year-old artist who takes his final stab at youth by trying to bed a series of attractive young girls. "Loving" tells the story of an older couple's plan to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to sea caves on Crete, where the husband long ago had a tryst with a girl from Cincinnati. In "A Remarkably Pretty Girl," a young, recently divorced woman walking home after a one-night stand sees her entire future unfold before her in a hopeful, exuberant vision: "Eventually, there would be even more children…Eventually, it would begin to seem unlikely that anyone, even a hairdresser had ever called her a remarkably pretty girl. And then she would begin to live." "Rat," in contrast, finds a woman regretting an adventurous affair after her lover gets sick and she feels obligated to help with his ongoing care. Bingham explores the unexpected and sometimes disconcerting underside of experience in these pages, revealing an admirable gift for subtlety and understatement.

November 15, 2002
This collection of 11 short stories focuses mostly on the lives of women at different ages, stages, and conditions of life. The stories all concern the minutiae of relationships: what works and what doesn't, what concessions are made for love, what lines are drawn for self-preservation, the hopeful and the hopeless. From the 63-year-old college teacher canning apricots with a 20-year old student to a woman fulfilling her partner's fantasy life, the stories vary in content but are uniformly well written; all of them convey a sense of personal growth. The author of several novels (e.g., Small Victories), two collections of short stories, and a memoir, Bingham crafts characters who are sympathetic and believable, and her insightful descriptions paint clear pictures in the mind, evoking feelings of familiarity. Recommended for all general literature collections.-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2002
Bingham has been writing fiction for decades, and her newest short stories evince the tangy fruits of her labors in their graceful balance, refined composition, telling details, and the probity of their emotions. Each polished and sexy tale (most set in New Mexico) centers on a fencing match of sorts between lovers, family members, or friends, confrontations that, for all their intensity, are decorous and stoked by desire, not the urge to do harm. And each sparring pair is unusual in its matchup, even, as the book's title suggests, transgressive, but only in the most genteel manner. Bingham is particularly interested in how intelligent women adjust to age in terms of their sexuality and self-image, coupling older women with younger men in the subtly erotic "Apricots" and "The Splinter." Bingham's women are piquantly complex, and she also writes with wit and authority from a male point of view, tenderly portraying a gay man who graciously accepts his lover's attraction to another, and a famous, wily, and lustful elderly painter in the gloriously rambunctious "Benjamin."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)