Title: A wild, cold state
First published: 1995
Description: Debra Monroe received glowing nationwide reviews for her first volume of stories, The Source of Trouble, which won the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award and established her as an important new voice in contemporary American fiction. Here, in her new collection, Monroe's novellas and stories are linked by the lives of six characters who inhabit the cold, unforgiving geography of rural Wisconsin.

As they pass in and out of each other's lives, what persists is a state of mind in which - in the words of one character - "it was possible, inevitable, that love would streak from the sky and warm me all the way to the soles of my cold feet.".

The stories run a gamut of moods and textures, ranging from the nostalgic "The World's Great Love Novels," in which the young narrator observes the violent compromises adults make in the name of love, to the hard-edged and gritty "Crossroads Cafe," in which a waitress searches for tenderness, though nothing in her life so far suggests that tenderness is available.

In this wild, cold state, lust seems eerie and unfamiliar, and the language of hunting and fishing infects all activities, even courtship and the words that describe it.

Nearly all the stories feature women of various classes, united by their desire for love and fulfillment in a land dominated by glacial winds and stormy men. In the ruefully funny "Royal Blues," the wife of a musician copes with her husband's infidelities and spiraling coke habit, at the same time noting that the facts of life aren't wildness and desolation but a search for the human connection that keeps wildness and desolation at bay.

Leaping quirkily from the colloquial into poetry, reeling and dipping with the cadences of conversation and an overweening make-do philosophy, these stories read like surreal confessions, dispatches from the battlefield of everyday life.
Subjects: Fiction, Country life, Rural conditions
Places: Wisconsin
LC classification: PS3563.O5273 W55 1995