Books
Galveston
by Sean Stewart
Sometime in the near future, perhaps in an alternate reality, magic comes surging and crashing back into our rational world, creating a disaster of never-before-seen magnitude. In Galveston the survivors cope by shunting all of the magic and magic users, except for one woman who enforces the magical boundary, into the deserted carnival area. Sloane Gardner is the daughter and heir apparent of the town's mayor, a woman whose reign is fading as her body slowly stops responding to her will. In order to become her own woman and a proper leader, the compliant and quiet Sloane must discover her inner tart. She creates a magical mask which allows her to slip into the carnival as "Sly," a bolder and more seductive woman. "Pride heals," she learns. Sloane's story is intertwined with that of Joshua Cane's, a dry unlikable man whose self-image has exceeded his reality for years. Galveston is a story of families and faith, commitments and courage, imagination and integrity. Ace Fantasy hardcover, March 2000, $23.95.Maryelizabeth HartTarts . . Stories . . Mom's . . Man/Woman We Love . . Route 66 . . Studio . .
Unputdownable
The Uncollected Dorothy Parker, ed. Stuart Y Silverstein
"The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word.All the things a fan expects, and a few things one doesn't expect, from "Our Dot" are found in in Stuart Silverstein's anthology of her early uncollected work. The punning is there in abundance, as are the delicately barbed insults, and her hilarious fury is well displayed in the Hate Songs, in which she declares her hatred of women, men, bohemians, actresses, actors, slackers, relatives, bores, drama, parties, movies, books, young people, her office mates and college boys.
Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay home at night.
They do not keep awake till 3, Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure, Nor recognise the overture.
They shrink from powder and from paints...
So far, I've had no complaints."
But the tone is more tart than acid and there are also poems built on lush imagery and genuine sentiment. Parker had a gift for the whiptail ending that betrays the preceding sweet sentiment of a poem, but in this collection, there are a few where she lets the sweetness stand.
Silverstein's 69-page introduction is as good a biography as I've read of Dorothy. He faithfully chronicles Parker's life, with a lot of juicy anecdotes, and the section on her early years in New York is especially lively. At Vogue in 1914, she penned the famous aphorism, "brevity is the soul of lingerie" and ran afoul of the priggish copy-editors.
This was followed by hijinks at Vanity Fair with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, and her entry into the fabled Algonquin Round Table in 1919, which included Benchley and other notables such as George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber. This is when she was still having fun, before her first suicide attempt in 1923, triggered by a disastrous affair and resulting abortion. After that, there were more disastrous marriages and love affairs, financial problems, alcoholism, more suicide attempts, and a misguided brush with communist politics in Hollywood, where she was blacklisted.
It's refreshing to read Parker's earlier work and get a glimpse of the younger, more hopeful Dorothy before the whiptail betrayals in her own life turned all her sweetness to acid. In Moral Tales For The Young she brightly advises bad children on how to be good at being bad. Would that Parker had learned these lessons herself. She was a bad girl who was not very good at being bad, didn't enjoy it much, and paid for it dearly. That moral lesson is as good as any I've learned since college, and is itself worth the price of the book.