A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You : Stories
by Amy Bloom
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Book Summary Information
Author: Amy BloomEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-07-31
ISBN: 0375705570
Number of pages: 164
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You : Stories
Book Review: Even A Blind Man Can See Himself In Amy Bloom's Characters
Summary: 5 Stars
In Amy Bloom's second collection of short stories, some of her characters include the mother of a transsexual, a teenaged girl with a dying mother, and a man who is tormented by the night he had sex with his stepmother after his father's funeral. En masse, these characters and their circumstances may seem outrageous, but Bloom's honest portrayal of their inner-lives provides us instead with a window into the universal experience of love and pain. Though the suffering of these characters is palpable, Bloom's writing remains witty, lyrical, and always sharp-never allowing a single moment of these unlikely stories to seem exaggerated or out of place. In "Rowing to Eden," for example, we are presented with a No Exit kind of situation. A woman in her final stage of Chemo Therapy is living in the same house with her lesbian best friend and her doting but dopey husband. As it is with all the other stories in this collection, the defining moments of characterization come with little action. Instead, we understand the story in terms of the delicate relationships and interactions between the three people involved-their slight dialogues, embarrassingly awkward at times, but always poignant and telling. As it is in Sartre's play, Bloom's characters seem trapped, bound together in a sad and fruitless triangle. Bloom boldly takes her readers on a tour of this triangle, allowing us to look in on it through descriptions of dinners and sunsets until suddenly we find ourselves inside the head of the guilt-ridden patient who finds her husband pathetic despite his efforts to help her beat cancer. We also manage to see the situation through the eyes of the husband, a man who just wants his beautiful healthy wife back, and from the perspective of the wife's best friend, a lesbian whose devotion to her friend is steadfast if not obsessive.
The beginning of "The Gates Are Closing," examines the experience of a woman helping her lover who has Parkinson's Disease paint the synagogue that his wife presides over. Initially, this may seem absurd, but once Bloom has painted her picture in full, we are forced to notice all the subtle shades of pain and longing that exist behind this scene, as Bloom deftly fills in the spaces between what her characters think and what they do.
Ultimately, although Bloom's characters seem capable of anything, including surprising themselves with their own ability to overcome unusual hardships, neatly packaged endings where vexed people find solace and conflicts are smoothed out into oblivion don't show up in this collection-and thankfully so. Instead, as disturbing as the circumstances that dictate each story may be, Bloom makes it all believable-even somewhat hopeful-reminding us that as humans it is the details of our tumultuous relationships that bring our love for one another to life.
Summary of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You : Stories
Amy Bloom was nominated for a National Book Award for her first collection, Come to Me, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Antaeus, and other magazines, and in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In her new collection, she enhances her reputation as a true artist of the form.Here are characters confronted with tragedy, perplexed by emotions, and challenged to endure whatever modern life may have in store. A loving mother accompanies her daughter in her journey to become a man, and discovers a new, hopeful love. A stepmother and stepson meet again after fifteen years and a devastating mistake, and rediscover their familial affection for each other. And in "The Story," a widow bent on seducing another woman's husband constructs and deconstructs her story until she has "made the best and happiest ending" possible "in this world."
It was Henry James who first claimed the imagination of disaster, but in Amy Bloom's stunning second collection, she appears to have inherited the mantle. Most of the characters in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You are pursued by at least one of the biological furies: cancer, miscarriage, Parkinson's disease. And even those with their health intact tend to be sick at heart, having run the gantlet of family life and suffered what the military men like to call friendly fire. Yet the effect of these brilliant stories is anything but dreary. Instead they produce an odd sense of elation--Bloom somehow persuades us that her characters will continue under their own steam long after we've closed the book, and she alternates hope and hopelessness in exactly the right, recognizable proportions.
Take the title story, in which a middle-aged mother is determined to see her daughter through the rigors of a sex-change operation. Jane puts up a good front, almost but not quite earning the title of Transsexual Mom of the Year, and supports her "handsome boy-girl" every step of the way. Yet the strain shows. And when she meets a supernaturally nice man, she can't quite credit her good fortune--even his appearance at her door with an armload of flowers touches off a fresh round of ambivalence:
And standing on the little porch of the condo, barely enough room for two medium-size people and forty-eight roses, Jane sees that she has taken her place in the long and honorable line of fools for love: Don Quixote and Hermia and Oscar Wilde and Joe E. Brown, crowing with delight, clutching his straw boater and Jack Lemmon as the speedboat carries them off into a cockeyed and irresistible future.The inclusion of Some Like It Hot's Joe E. Brown, who's gotten both more and less than he bargained for in his cross-dressing sweetheart, is a typically marvelous touch. And lest we think that Bloom has weighted the scales too heavily in favor of disillusion, Jane's new lover gets in the last word, citing the South Carolina state motto: "Dum spiro, spero.... While I breathe, I hope." Just keep breathing, the reader wants to say.
"Stars at Elbow and Foot" and "Rowing to Eden" are no less effective in their mingling of tragedy and sublime trivia. In two other stories, Bloom revives the Sampson clan, which she first introduced in Come to Me, and beautifully extends her mini-epic of mixed-race life without a grain of namby-pamby PC hesitation. And last but not least, there's "The Story," a tricky number in which Bloom seems to shoot to hell her own reputation for Chekhovian decency. Here we have a narrator who lies and dissembles, destroys her rival, and lives to tell the (metafictional) tale: "Even now I regard her destruction as a very good thing, and that undermines the necessary fictive texture of deep ambiguity, the roiling ambivalence that might give tension to the narrator's affection." In the end, though, Bloom is simply too gifted a writer to banish all seven types of ambiguity from her work. She understands that we are hopelessly divided creatures and cuts us the necessary, unsentimental slack. Or to put it another way, she forgives all--but forgets nothing. --James Marcus
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