Has anybody read Amy Bloom’s new book? I know that Away was and still is widely read. Today I was reading The New York Times Book Review and I am still curious to read Where the God of Love Hangs Out.

They travel to St. Kitts for winter breaks and to Florence for their 20th wedding anniversaries. They play CDs of Joan Sutherland in their car radios. When crises arise they take to bourbon in the midafternoon and snack on olive tapenade. Rome’s air pollution is a likely subject of conversation over their dinners, which might feature gnocchi in basil cream sauce and radicchio and orange salad, washed down with a St.-Amour Beaujolais. They read The Economist and go to psychiatrists who subscribe to Paris-Match. Readily dropping foreign phrases, they flatter a woman by saying that she looks like a Balthus or that she has a lot of chien.”

Which is to say that most of the characters in Amy Bloom’s fictions are exceedingly cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. In her latest, erotically charged, highly explicit collection of short stories, “Where the God of Love Hangs Out,” they also think and speak in a cheeky if not impudent manner. “You come to my house and I’ll shoot you myself,” a daughter says to her difficult mother. An aging man, recalling the loves of his early youth, describes one as “a big, bushy-haired girl with thighs like Smithfield hams,” another as “an Egyptian ballerina whose kohl ran onto his linen sport coat.” “Your prostate alone’s enough to scare her off,” a fellow advises a friend whose marriage has grown precarious. “You gotta get a guest room just to keep it somewhere.”

This upbeat sassiness of tone is one of the many treasures of Bloom’s new collection, which differs markedly from her previous ones (“Come to Me,” “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You”). It includes two sets of linked narratives, each consisting of four stories, as well as several free-standing stories . . .

. . . Bloom, who is also a psychotherapist, vividly chronicles the inner lives of people caught in emotional and physical constraints — illnesses they are striving to survive, regrets they are trying to allay, desires they often dare not fulfill. She writes in beautifully wrought prose, with spunky humor and a flair for delectably eccentric details. Her narrative talents include a fine touch with flashbacks, which she handles as suavely as any writer I can think of. Her gift for dialogue is equally terrific. Here is Lionel instructing 15-year-old Buster about the facts of life:

“You want to be the kind of man women beg for sex. . . . Don’t slobber. You’re not a washcloth. You. Are. A. Lover.”

Brava, Ms. Bloom. Send us an equally sly, dashing book very soon, please.

Click here for the full review written by Francine du Plessix Gray, February 7, 2010.

Illustration of Amy Bloom by Tina Berning.

by Kelly Pickerill

Point Omega by Don DeLillo.  I talked to Nan about it on Saturday, and she said that along with Coetzee’s new one, Summertime, she considers Point Omega to be one of the most important novels she’s read in some time.

Excerpted from the New York Times Book Review article, “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Geoff Dyer:

The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project “24 Hour Psycho ” (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-­minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of “the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,” “Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.” Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece — what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time — that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the “radically altered plane of time”: “The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”

Illustration by John Ritter; photograph from Paramount Pictures

Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim. He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and — such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction — become a hostage to the habit of “gyrate exaggerations” (the phrase is in “The Body Artist”) and the signature patterns of “demolished logic.” “Point Omega” starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It’s barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it’s the latest increment and echo: a “last flare” that — we’ve been here before, too — may not be the last after all.

See Nan’s Blog on Point Omega.