Bonneville Blue - Hardcover

Chase's first collection displays the same subtlety and grace that distinguish her lyrical novels (During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, 1983; The Evening Wolves, 1989) from most other fiction about domestic life. There's nothing formulaic or predictable about these 11 nuanced tales about girls growing into their sexuality, women troubled by bad marriages, and men possessed by dreams of a better life. The young narrator of ``Aunt Josie'' learns about masculine desire and feminine wile by watching her beautiful and entrancing aunt, who lives at a state farm for boys where her husband is the athletic director and her niece visits for the summer. In ``J.C. Peach,'' an adolescent girl, infatuated with a more self-possessed classmate, shares with her the bond of their first periods. Slightly older, the 16-year-old narrator of ``Elderberries and Souls'' has a wild crush on her stepuncle until his dark moodiness sends her running back to her loyal beau, a less complex fellow her own age. In ``The Harrier,'' a married woman ``in a mist of yearning'' lusts for a local artist/mechanic, a younger man much closer to nature and more at peace with himself than her insensitive husband. Divorced women overcome self-pity and guilt in encounters with people worse off than they in ``Crowing'' and ``Ghost Dance.'' In ``Black Ice,'' a wife separated from her husband reviews on the phone their history of car accidents after he's survived a dramatic one alone. Chase's men are often driven by a fear of failure and a vision of a simpler life: the grandfather/defense-analyst in ``The Whole of the World'' must prove he's a better woodsman than his sons-in-law; the manic husband in ``An Energy Crisis'' changes his grand scheme with each job transfer; and the prep-school teacher in ``Jack Pine Savage,'' having abandoned his Ph.D. for the exigencies of a family, dreams of life as a French trapper in Canada. The title story, about life in a lower-middle-class housing development, is typical of Chase's superior storytelling skills--it's so multidimensional it resists paraphrase. Once again, Chase brings extraordinary elegance and imagination to everyday realism. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

These 11 stories by the author of During the Reign of the Queen of Persia and The Evening Wolves demonstrate a mature talent . Working in assured and poetically charged prose, Chase creates richly dimensional characters, seen against a variety of backgrounds and situations; she excels in capturing the social mores of a time and place. Apt imagery and unerring dialogue animate these tales, whose quiet epiphanies touch the heart. The title story, set in a housing development during the Vietnam war, concerns a woman who resents the "draft dodgers" who seem to have such an easy life, while the sole luxury of her hardscrabble existence is an aging Bonneville. In many of these stories, women are spunky and wise ("Peach") and life-enhancing ("Aunt Josie"); men are foolish and vainglorious ("The Whole of the World"), reckless ("Black Ice") or destructive (" The Harrier"). "An Energy Crisis," concerning another egotistical, overbearing male is the least successful here, perhaps because Chase has no sympathy for her protagonist, leaving him a pompous caricature. On the other hand, her compassion for the characters in the other stories, especially the feckless husband and his coping wife in the intense, resonant "Jack Pine Savage," render this a memorable collection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.