You Have the Wrong Man

March 4, 1996
In her first collection of short stories, Flook (Open Water) draws an imaginative gallery of eccentrics placed in left-of-center situations. Yet even in a story such as "The Golden Therapist," in which an office romance blooms after a woman discovers that a co-worker practices auto-erotic asphyxiation, the author emphasizes the humanity of her characters, never letting their plights turn cartoonish. In "Prince of Motown," she traces the trials faced by a teenage mother when she and her baby are forced into a women's shelter after her husband retreats into heroin addiction. "Exchange Street" concerns the relationship between a transsexual and her boyfriend, who wants the two of them to team-manage a strip club. While Flook's restraint in dealing with outrageous material may be admirable, it sometimes leads to ponderous or placid storytelling; compassion doesn't preclude comedy, and at least some of the eight tales here would have benefited from the sort of comic highlights and crescendos that seem natural to such extravagant goings-on.

March 1, 1996
Like the film "Exotica," Maria Flook's fiction seeks to both unsettle and move readers. Depicting characters afflicted with dark sexual impulses and odd maladies, this collection of eight stories, though wildly uneven, contains some stunning portraits of those who exist on the margins of society. In one of Flook's most successful efforts, "Exchange Street," a transvestite coping with the side effects of reconstructive surgery seeks to appease her lover by applying for a job managing a strip joint. The stories are set, for the most part, in Rhode Island, and the characters toil at low-wage jobs and are beset by all but insurmountable problems, including heroin addiction, incest, and mental illness. Flook, also the author of the widely praised novel "Family Night" (1993), has a tendency to overwrite, but when she finds her footing, she vividly evokes the complexity and humanity of troubled people who struggle to get by. ((Reviewed March 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)