Interior Design

Starred review from March 29, 1999
Novelist (How to Read an Unwritten Language) and short-story writer (The Art of the Knock) Graham fills his newest story collection with a sense of the power of imagination. One by one, his characters tap their own inventive powers to alter the troubling world around them. "Another Planet" views the emotional disintegration of a shoe salesman through the haunted eyes of his young son. "Angel" begins with a boy's fascination with watchful guardian angels, then comes down to earth to consider how agonizingly difficult it is to communicate the world as we observe it to a lover, a reading audience--or even to an angelic muse. In the title story, a fanciful interior decorator fashions dwellings from her clients' dreams until she falls in love with a man strangely lacking in dreams and attempts to impose her concepts of what his dreams should be. "Beauty Marks," the most effective entry here, chronicles the evolving relationship of a young couple--recently returned from Africa where they were researching their respective doctoral theses--and their growing awareness of the demons they must dispel in order to seal their new marriage. "The Pose" depicts an out-of-work factory worker creating a female body out of wire and then hanging his wife's clothes on its limbs; meanwhile, the wife hopes that this fetish will make him see her anew. Quietly engrossing, Graham's stories illustrate the ways our souls, craving meaning, instinctively make patterns out of experience--and that this process, whether heroic or neurotic, is not all that different from the work of an artist.

November 1, 1996
The eight stories collected here deal with the individual vs. the interpersonal as a situation rife with drama and epiphany. An eloquent and fluid writer, Graham (How To Read an Unwritten Language, LJ 8/95) breathes life into disparate characters, e.g., married anthropologists home from the field, both holding secrets they cannot share, and an orphan who finds salvation by proselytizing at a comedy club's open- mike night. While these stories do not share cast members or locales, they weave an admirably coherent tapestry lush with the textural vagaries of the titular concern. The consistent quality of Graham's prose makes his tales accessible to younger readers as well as to those who have read fine literature for decades. Highly recommended for any collection serving those who appreciate excellent storytelling.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.