Adams, Alice - Laurie Stone (essay date 1979)
Laurie Stone (essay date 1979)
SOURCE: "Short Circuits," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXIV, No. 14, April 2, 1979, p. 87.
[In the following review of Beautiful Girl, Stone finds Adams 's treatment of physical appearance refreshing, but she judges the stories trite.]
People tend not to write about what they don't like or wish did not exist—once it was blacks, homosexuals, and strong women. The fat and slovenly are the new subversives in the culture of the fit, threatening to the status quo ideal, undifferentiated and almost invisibilized in our art. When is the last time you read a story about a fat person?
Fat, plump, or strange-looking characters appear with arresting frequency in the stories Alice Adams has collected in Beautiful Girl Adams thinks that beauty—or the lack of it—is a fundamental matter. The fat, plain, and physically unacceptable are not just neutrally other than the beautiful and thin;...
[The entire page is 617 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
