Title: Taller women
First published: 1992
Description: Does it seem to you that women are taller than they used to be? That men are falling short? That the world is getting stranger? If so you'll be at home in the world of Taller Women, where you'll laugh at what you see, pull away from what you don't dare recognize. But some recognitions you won't be able to avoid. You'll encounter a mother devouring herself at the dinner table, traffic gridlock, Roy Rogers movies, a mysterious gathering of animals, a shipwreck, an innocent's first love, breasts as big as prizewinning watermelons, a pregnant woman on the Irish Sea, a farmhouse in flames, women accused of breaking their own necks in their enthusiasm for making love, and men who hang them off balconies by their hair. You'll meet a good man who treats women badly - his wife, for instance, "had been too good, too rich, in spirit, in beauty, in strength, in her love for him ... and in retrospect, he thought, it must have scared the hell out of him". Taller Women surprises, enlightens, provokes, and disturbs. It reveals what women discover about men: "They want you to be sexual, but only with them". And vice-versa: "There's something depressing about a happy woman". Wantonness in women, Naumoff tells us, will always be punished. With its heightened sense of reality and devastating social satire, Taller Women is a cautionary tale about possession and cruelty, innocence and love, weakness and desire.
Subjects: Man-woman relationships, Fiction, New York Times reviewed, Man-woman relationships, fiction
Places: North Carolina
LC classification: PS3564.A8745 T3 1992