Something Is Out There

October 12, 2009
Fissures of familial and amorous transgressions erupt in the seemingly placid lives of everyday people in Bausch's eighth collection (after novel, Peace
), where power outages, raging snow storms and the sweeping Mississippi River form a backdrop seething with looming menace for unhappy marriages and drowning dreams. In subtle but firm prose, Bausch allows his characters to stumble along a harrowing path that they hope will lead them to be, as the protagonist of “Blood” proclaims, “Free at last.” But freedom is elusive for many characters, including the two women and two children of the title story who hide out in a house during a storm. Elsewhere, sacred ground—be it the bed of a minister and his wife, a friend's marriage or a confessional booth—forms the stage for the pursuit of pleasure, healing and escape. Throughout, Bausch takes the chaotic fallout from simple acts—delaying a friend's husband so she can plan a surprise party, killing time on an errand, sleeping in and nearly missing an appointment—to show how dangerously close we may be to encountering a predatory world eager to destroy our comforts, relationships and beliefs.

January 1, 2010
In his latest collection, Bausch (Peace, 2008, etc.) occasionally allows his stylistic command to be undermined by symbolic heavy-handedness.

Character is key for this veteran author of novels and short fiction. His protagonists are neither good nor bad but, as one of the better stories here puts it,"honest in [a] self-deluding way." That story is"Byron the Lyron," about a man whose deepest love is for his sickly, strong-willed, 84-year-old mother Georgia, whose impending death is far more devastating to him than to her. Compounding the devastation is Byron's breakup with his boyfriend, who continues to sustain a relationship with Georgia; not until Byron is free of both can he come into his own. Bausch offers no heroes or villains here, just lives that in their essence resemble the ancient buildings in Rome (where Byron has moved),"with their long history, their beauty and complication, their tragedy and triumph, their songs and their sorrow." Two stories ("Son and Heir,""Something Is Out There") make use of a power outage to throw characters into thematic darkness; another ("One Hour in the History of Love") employs a cafe table that proves impossible to steady as a metaphor for the couples sitting at it. In the title piece, a woman on the verge of upending her family's life finds it instead upended by circumstances beyond her control, though she comes to see them as connected:"[T]his day's badness was the beginning of something more, an unfolding." Love is a predominant concern throughout this collection, which raises the metaphysical ante with the closing story,"Sixty-five Million Years," in which a priest finds his spiritual torpor shaken by the doubts of a troubled, precocious young stranger.

Plenty here for Bausch fans to admire, but no startling breakthrough to attract a wider readership.

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Starred review from December 15, 2009
This is a fearless, harrowing collection of short fiction focusing on relationships in various stages of decay, dissolution, and collapse. Bausch is an acclaimed short fiction writer, and the work collected here clearly shows a master at work. Cumulatively, these stories become a kind of meditation on the ability of love to survive time and change. For Bausch, who explores the relationships here with Jamesian depth and sophistication, the news is not encouraging. In most of these stories, love does not endure. Instead, we find lonely people often driven to desperate action or despair. In "Reverend Thornhill's Wife," for example, a deeply unhappy woman with a kind and supportive husband initiates a sexual relationship in her own home with a stranger she has met on the Internet. In "Blood," a young man develops a perilous and unhealthy obsession with his older brother's troubled wife. VERDICT These are courageous stories about the human desire for connection and the often unrealized search for love. A powerful, disturbing, and significant book for fans of heavy-hitting fiction. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09.]Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2009
Bausch, an exceptional and prodigious fiction writer whose many accolades include the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, follows his unforgettable war novel, Peace (2008), with a subtly powerful collection of new short stories, many about the unfathomable currents and riptides of matrimony. Marriages flounder before theyve barely begun, as in Immigration, a taut tale of intensifying emotional confusion, and in the sweetly stressed The Harp Department of Love, a portrait of the tentative marriage between an emeritus music professor and his best former student. A capsizing marriage is the catalyst for friction among three brothers one hot summer in Blood. The hair-raising title story takes place during a blizzard in Virginia, as a woman who wants to leave her husband realizes that he has placed their family in danger. In the beautifully structured and complexly affecting Byron the Lyron, a gay man mourns the end of a 12-year relationship and worries about his ailing mother. Endlessly imaginative and empathic, Bausch continues the great American tradition of virtuosic short stories planted in the ordinary and catapulting into the inexplicable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)