![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Yet these men and women are often too weak and frightened to handle the disruption that inevitably results. He is also a social commentator, in the tradition of Updike or Roth, who chronicles our American times while chronicling his characters' love lives.Īfter a brief hiatus of chronicling the obsessions of candy-eaters everywhere with his nonfiction book Candyfreak, Almond is back to doing what, in this reader's opinion, he does best: writing short stories about deeply-feeling but screwed up people who, as Almond puts it in one of Chow's strongest pieces, “Summer, As In Love,” desperately want “a major disruption” in the form of romance. The thing about Almond, though, is that he doesn't write sex so much as he writes erotic connection-generally flawed and failed, but sometimes also madly, even earnestly romantic, in the best, most complicated ways. I once read a blurb on a Mary Gaitskill book that called Gaitskill (one of my favorite writers), the “poetess of wounded eroticism,” adding, “quite frankly, no one can touch her.” This was, of course, before Steve Almond's My Life in Heavy Metal, which heralded Almond onto the scene as perhaps the male counterpart to what Gaitskill was doing in the 1990's-only at a time when, given the country's current moral climate, writing sex has fallen somewhat out of vogue. Chow by Steve Almond, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005 ![]()
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