Hunger
Jane Eaton Hamilton
Oberon Press, Canada
157 pp. No price listed
Jane
Eaton Hamilton’s new story collection, Hunger, reels off portrait after
portrait of the anxieties and difficulties inherent in human relationships: A
jealous man has trouble with his wife’s flirtatious relationship with a young
coworker. A Canadian lesbian takes her partner to Key West hoping to rekindle
their relationship and ends up reflecting on the importance of matching
haircuts. A man coping with his wife’s mastectomy
steals a fake breast at a breast cancer symposium. A newly uncloseted lesbian
has to deal with the emotional problem of her loving husband. A father cannot
bring himself to love his newborn, resenting the distance the child has imposed
between him and his wife. A woman suffers from a mysterious cardiac problem that
won’t go away. A lesbian is surprised by the sudden unexpected pregnancy
(through covert “traditional” methods) of her lover, who may or may not be a
wannabe. A father has problems dealing with his twenty-year-old daughter’s
sexual liaison with an older man.
At
its core, this collection displays riveting but subtle examinations of pain
while exploring the problem of loving another human being in an uncertain
universe. Hamilton’s prose shows a reserved emotional depth that matches and
accentuates a similar sense of reservation in her protagonists. These souls—men
and women, lesbian and straight—all are riven in some measure by the divide
between expectation and reality, yet they more often than not hide their pain
and dismay with terse locution or subtle masks formed from routine and blind
hope. Hunger bleeds pathos in an assured but seldom obvious manner,
consistently splattering the reader with torrents of concrete anxiety. One can
tease out a distinct vein of the existential in Hamilton’s cool, marbled prose
and it is this (along with her distinct and controlled voice) that makes her
collection eminently readable. Little wonder that many of Hamilton’s stories
have been honored with substantial awards. Her ability is clear.
I
suppose I would be remiss were I not to address the lesbian angle in many of
these stories (though in a perfect world I probably wouldn’t have to). Having
had numerous friends and acquaintances from that side of the aisle, I was
pleased to see that Hamilton’s investigation of the emotional and relational
difficulties involved within the many-faceted lesbian subculture hits spot on.
The emotional problems of gays living in or seeking committed relationships
differ little from the problems of straight individuals in similar
circumstances: there are questions of common interest, of jealousy, distrust,
anxiety, insecurity, anger, diminishing emotion—all the hobgoblins that
trouble anyone struggling with love and/or commitment. Hamilton’s lesbian
stories simply show the universality of romantic experience and the
ridiculousness of gender classification in an open society. Her male
protagonists have the same problems as her female and lesbian protagonists—they
all suffer from the inescapable tribulations of life.
Jane
Eaton Hamilton’s Hunger is elegant, controlled fiction bursting with
pain, prospective tragedy, and hope. We recommend it without reservation.
-CAW-
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