Happy Trails to You

March 10, 2008
Returning from the story collection Do the Windows Open?
(1996) and novel, The Unprofessionals
(2003), Hecht’s married, childless photographer is still stuck in her mid-40s. Diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and counting the Nantucket days until she can see her psychiatrist again, she quietly frets the summer away over the course of seven expertly heartbreaking tales. The narrator has mastered her issues, but only to the point that her horror—of other people’s meat eating, of their bodily flaws and of almost everything else about them—surfaces in only the mildest passive-aggressive forms; what goes on beneath that surface is what comprises the book. “Over There” chronicles two visits to an elderly hard-of-hearing neighbor: its tacit comparison of the narrator’s ways of accommodating her illness with her neighbor’s accommodations of old age is exquisite. “Being and Nothingness” records the narrator’s use of an Emerson biography and of taking the flag down as an antidote to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Elsewhere, she intervenes in a gay actor-waiter acquaintance’s health regimen, and instructs her intractable Jamaican “cleaner helper” Norma on the dangers of radiation—and on how to dress for her job. A life that consists entirely of neurotic avoidance produces a peculiar pathos, and Hecht nails it unfailingly.

May 15, 2008
In the title story of Hecht's newest collection featuring her anonymous, anxiety-ridden, fortysomething photographer-narrator introduced in "Do the Windows Open?" and "The Unprofessionals", a young man interviewing the narrator comments: "You know what I like about your work? It's kind of a trail." Protests the narrator, "But it's not a happy trail." And that describes Hecht's work perfectly. These tales are no straightforward narratives but rather meandering trails of funny yet poignant observations, almost obsessive in their minute detail, of the absurdities and indignities of modern life: bleached teeth, the wisdom of alternative medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil, caller ID ("If Dorothy Parker had had the good fortune brought by caller ID, at least, she would have known what kind of [fresh] hell to expect"), the media coverage of the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal ("After watching this cableful of shows, it was being and nothingness, it was the living dead"), and right-wing Republicans. Beneath the humor, though, there is a deep-rooted sadness as reflected in the first story, "Over There," in which the narrator visits an elderly neighbor on Christmas Day and mourns her deceased parents, "]but I'm not going there. That's forbidden territory, the land of wishing my father and mother were alive." Hecht is an acquired taste; her discursiveness may irritate some readers, but for those who enjoy original voices, she's high on the menu. For larger fiction collections.Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2008
The queen of eviscerating deadpan humor is back, and just in time. If you cant laugh at our new cruel and tough society, how can you face each day? Not that Hechts high-strung, routinely appalled vegetarian narrator, last seen quivering in The Unprofessionals (2003), always manages to get out of bed. Even on beautiful, windswept Nantucket, its a struggle to escape the clamorous, junk-food-fueled, computer-bewitched world and the constant spewing of soul-crushing news. A photographer versed in botanical remedies and given to intense friendships with lonely gay men, she is nearly defeated by marauding bad taste and rudeness as she ponders the new greenhouse climate and struggles to hold her idols, Emerson, Thoreau, and Paul McCartney, in mind to keep from plunging into total despair. Hechts lightning rod for lies, crassness, ignorance, and selfishness may be ultrasensitive, but she is also smart, caustic, and secretly heroic, delivering hilarious and devastating one-liners on the subjects of age, womanhood, health, despicable politicians, and the lost arts of reading, listening, and thinking, while making a convincing case for living attentively and graciously.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)