The Curse Of The Appropriate Man

by Lynn Freed

Overview

These fourteen short stories, written over the past ten years but never before collected, deal with the struggles between mothers and their wayward daughters, the often preposterous bonds that tie men and women together, and the complex games masters and servants play with one another. In spare, elegant prose, Freed delivers surprise after surprise as she shakes the truth from life. Whether it's her portrayal of a mother mired in senile dementia in "Ma," a young girl experiencing her first sexual encounter with an itinerant knife-sharpener in "Under the House," or a young woman incapable of loving conventionally in "An Error of Desire," Freed portrays the absurdity, the delusions, the dramas, and the dignity of her characters' lives. These masterful stories reinforce her reputation as one of our most fearless and sophisticated explorers of sexual and filial love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156029940
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/01/2004
Series:	Harvest Original
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

LYNN FREED was awarded the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of six novels, a short story collection, and a collection of essays.

Read an Excerpt

Under the House

TWICE A YEAR, THE SHARPENER ARRIVED AT THE top gate, whistled for them to lock up the dogs, and then made his way around the back of the house to the kitchen lawn. Usually, the girl was there first. She squatted like him to see the files and stones laid out in a silent circle, the carving knife taken up, the flash of the blade as he curved his wrist left and right, never missing. And then the gleaming thing laid down on the tray, where she longed to touch it.

If the nanny saw the girl out there, she called her in. The Sharpener was a wild man, she said, he drank cheap brandy and lived under a piece of tin. He could be a Coloured, said her mother, or just dark from working in the sun, and from lawnmower grease, and from not washing properly.

But whenever the girl heard his whistle, she ran out anyway. He never looked up at her. He wasn't the sort of man to notice a child growing year by year, or to care. He seemed to consider only the knives, always choosing the carver first, holding it up to the light, running its edge along the pad of his thumb. When all the knives were sharpened and he walked around to the front verandah, she followed him there. She waited next to his satchel while he opened the little door and climbed down under the house to fetch the lawnmower.

And then one day she asked, "What do you do under the house?"

And he stopped on the top step and turned to look at her with his dirty green eyes. He didn't smile, he never smiled. But he tossed his head for her to follow him, and so she did, down into the cool, dim light.

She knew the place well. It was deep and wide, running the length of the verandah, and high enough to stand up in. Bicycles were kept down there, and the old doll's pram, pushed now behind the garden rakes and hoes and clippers. There were sacks of seed, and bulbs, manure, and cans of oil. Through an opening in the wall, deeper in, were rooms and rooms of raw red earth, with walls and passages between them, like the house above. In the middle was a place no light could reach. She had crawled back there once, and crouched, and listened to rats scraping and darting, footsteps above, the dogs off somewhere. It smelled sour back there, and damp, and wonderful.

The Sharpener stood just out of a beam of light that came in through one of the vents. He tossed his head at her again and moved deeper into the shadow.

She knew rude things. She had done rude things with cousins and friends. There was a frenzy to them-the giggling and hushing and urging on. But now she stood solemn and still as the Sharpener came to crouch before her. He lifted her skirt and found her bloomers, pulled them down to her knees.

"We can lie down," he said.

But she shook her head, and he stood up again. He unbuttoned his trousers, pulled his thing through the slit and held it out on the palm of his hand. She knew he was offering it to her, asking for something too, his eyes never leaving her face. But she clasped her hands behind her back and looked down at the floor.

He pushed himself closer, pushed his thing up under her skirt, against her stomach, breathing his smell all over her, sweat and liquor and dirt. He turned her around and crouched behind her to push it between her legs. When she lifted her skirt, she saw it sticking through as if it were her own, and she giggled.

Copyright © 2004 by Lynn Freed

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive,
Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Under the House
Foreign Student
The Widow's Daughter
Family of Shadows
An Error of Desire
Liars, Cheats, and Cowards
The Curse of the Appropriate Man
The Mirror
Twilight
Selina Comes to the City
William
Songbird
The First Rule of Happiness
Ma: A Memoir
Luck

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR LYNN FREED
"Freed wonderfully carries off that hardest of all literary effects-it feels effortless and therefore absolutely real."-Elle

"I'd say it's feminist fiction in the mode of Flaubert and Daniel Defoe."-All Things Considered, NPR

—

From the Publisher

With razor-sharp prose that recalls Jean Rhys in its intensity and with a preference for the dreamy eroticism favored by Marguerite Duras, South African novelist Lynn Freed proves yet again that she is expertly equipped to dissect the defiant longings and treacherous pleasures of the daughters and mothers, lovers and adventurers whom she imagines in her fiction.
— The Washington Post

Laura Ciolkowski

As these stories amply illustrate, [Freed] is, rather, one whose style and preferred subject are eminently well matched, whose spare, classic prose exposes hidden acts while pointing obliquely at hidden thoughts. Like any successful star, she knows her strengths and how to employ them; and at her best -- as in Under the House -- she is truly fine indeed.
— The New York Times

Claire Messud

Women's relationships with their mothers, their lovers, their culture and their own sexuality are the subject of the 14 stories (written over nearly 20 years) in this fine collection. Freed, the author of five novels (The Mirror; House of Women; etc.), creates achingly real women and lovingly rendered misfits, and she reports straightforwardly and without judgment on their unconventional urges and questionable decisions. "Under the House" recounts a young girl's first sexual encounter with a traveling knife sharpener in the crawl space under her house and her subsequent memories of what should have been a traumatic event for her but was in fact something much more ambiguous. "The Widow's Daughter" tells of a young woman, possibly abused as a child, discovering and then flaunting her sexual power, much to her mother's horror. In the affecting title story, a middle-aged woman ponders how "half a lifetime of appropriate men can leave a woman parched for adventure." She dates two eccentric men but, finding herself still longing for the exotic, travels to Asia. On her way back, she meets a friend who's taken the opposite tack, marrying for convenience ("Quite acceptable, once you get over the death of the heart"). A few of these stories are schematic in their briefness, but most are quietly devastating and deeply resonant. Agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at William Morris. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A witty, accomplished debut collection from the South African-born novelist (House of Women, 2002, etc.). Beginning with "Under the House," the taut tale of a first sexual experience that ends in violence and retribution-and becomes the erotic cornerstone of a woman's life-these impeccably written stories detail the complicated pull of sexuality, power, and love. The title story puts a wicked twist on the ludicrous possibilities of dating for a woman who's "parched for adventure" after dating only "appropriate men." Enter a bearded Bavarian "in the seventeenth year of his doctoral dissertation" on "ecology and Chinese" (he also plays cello on the street and teaches archery at a community college). This man invites the narrator to dinner-and serves squirrel. His improvised kitchen hovers above the floor on a system of ropes and pulleys that also hold his cello, a music-stand, and a chair ("He reaches for a winch and winds down the toaster oven, which makes a neat four-point landing on the ledge"). Bachelor Number Two is an unpublished and impoverished Irish writer working on his sixth novel. He brings the woman flowers and will dine off nothing but china, though bought at a secondhand store. Story's end, which comes a bit quickly, is as pointed as its characterizations. In "The First Rule of Happiness," Antonia, her elderly mother, and her current lover, Thomas, vacation together in a gruesome love triangle. Thomas astutely sees that "she counted on him to understand that her mother's happiness ruled her life" and that "mother and daughter were held together in a sort of grip of need-one to give, the other to snatch for herself." By the end, that need is out in the open. Severalpieces-like "Selina Comes to the City" and "William"-are knowing explorations of master-servant relationships in South Africa, while a young girl in "Songbird" learns that a Holocaust survivor's story-that her singing kept her alive-isn't true. Fourteen sophisticated treasures.

Kirkus Reviews