Love hangs out in forbidden places in this short story collection: it steals into the heart of a woman for her friend's husband; it blooms in a brief affair between stepmother and stepson. Amy Bloom, author of a well-regarded book about gender, Normal, as well as several novels and story collections, here pushes the boundaries of socially accepted relationships, testing the concept of "normal" love, not only romantic but also parental and platonic.
It is where love no longer hangs out, however, that proves most poignant, for this is a collection haunted with the raw pain of having lost what was most loved. There is a marked emphasis on physical deterioration, with foot problems proving a particular motif. William suffers from gout yet his lover, Clare, does not mind his "grotesquely" floundering foot, swollen and purple, nor does her affection diminish throughout her children's chickenpox, or the "dark smell" of her mother's dying. Clare, too, can't walk after spraining her ankle. Scattered through the pages are hypertension pills, indomethacin, cholesterol pills, Viagra. The test of love is to look after those in sickness as well as in health.
The word "unbearable" recurs, for these sensitive stories each capture moments at which body or heart are at breaking point. "I felt the strings holding me together just snap," confesses one character. If Bloom exposes human fragility, she also depicts the strongest, most steadfast love – what it is to love the least lovable of people, unwaveringly, even after death or drug addiction do them part.
The tonic against fallible human relationships is the daydream. In contrast to the humdrum reality through which they have stumbled, fallen and finally "given up all hope of ever walking on beautiful days", characters muse on stories of the great Greek gods. Perfect love hangs out only in an idealised realm where all broken things can be put right, in wistful fantasies "so beautiful, so drenched in the lush, streaming light of what is not".
Bloom achieves a spare, elegant poetry: "her heart hearing mother after so long, blew across the bright night sky and stirred the long branches of the willow tree". The finely wrought sentences are short and taut, as if the often incapacitated characters are wasting no time in telling their tales; "I love you past speech", a mother tells her son. Only in their losses do they grow wise about how precious are time and tenderness. In Bloom's capable hands, the short story is perfect for depicting lives in which love hangs out in snatched, secret moments of hectic days.
