children mature: In “Thanksgiving Day,” a holiday dinner at the grandparents’ goes awry as Gus’s father’s memory fails and his temper flares; “Allowance” sketches a family vacation during which Gus’s drinking, impatience with the children, and inability to leave work behind similarly spoil the family holiday. Little wonder that in “Wildflowers,” the children perceive Rose’s adoration of vacation neighbor Wilbur Kittredge, although the story’s final scene depicts her more overwhelming exhilaration with motherhood.

In “Party Blues,” Sophie’s concluding memory of the aura of safety she relished as a child in the story “Madeline” contrasts with the confusion and chaos that adolescent love, alcohol, and drugs create during a party she and her siblings throw in their parents’ absence—one which emulates the parties from which her parents have withdrawn as Gus’s alcoholism worsened. Danger of a return to this pattern in “The Navigator” provokes intervention by his children, who may harbor some hope that his former abilities at a ship’s helm will carry over into the family. Although some hope momentarily emerges that he will regain such capabilities, the story concludes with the dramatic shattering of a tranquil family picnic by the sound of his opening a can of beer.

While the “Accident” announced in the climactic story’s title initially refers to son Sherman’s drunk driving, the car accident that claimed Rose Vincent’s life six months before is behind the family’s current turmoil. With no mother to comfort him and a father who will not step forward to assume authority, Sherman’s ache culminates in a wail that signals the danger of breakdown and despair. After the family muddles through the first Christmas after Rose’s death in the penultimate story, “Wedlock,” the volume concludes with the award-winning story “Thorofare,” in which a provisional unity results after Gus takes the helm and leads the family on an improvised ceremony to dispose of Rose’s ashes—a year and a half after her death. Illustrating individual style with a common purpose, each family member scatters a handful of ashes in a moving farewell; on shore, they regroup in an order that emulates their lineup in youth—a unity that is as evocative and promising as it is transitory, a loose coherence similar to the form of the collection as a whole.

Lust, and Other Stories

Minot’s 1989 collection, Lust, and Other Stories, which contains twelve stories divided evenly into three sections, traces the curve of male-female relationships from early attraction through incipient breakups to the aftermath, when despair and desperation lead to the initiation of new relationships. Her female protagonists’ instincts lead them in directions contrary to fulfillment, toward self-centered and distracted men threatened by commitment. The collection received somewhat mixed reviews, with The New York Times Book Review praising it as “superbly organized, poignant, and profound” and noting how the stories resonate and progressively accumulate meaning. Time magazine remarked that Minot’s eye for “clinching detail” was less acute than in earlier short fiction and that the collection exhibited sameness in its focus on unmarried people in their thirties in “modish urban lofts and restaurants.”

“Lust” opens the volume with an assembly of vignettes concerning sensuality and passionate encounters, where betrayal by the senses and by the male partners the narrator chooses seems inevitable. She melts easily into sensual abandon, although the results of her encounters gradually shift from erotic bliss and relief to the feeling that she is “sinking in muck,” surrendering to sadness after desire is consummated and her partners disregard her. Passion thus gives way to ennui, and ultimately wary defensiveness: “You open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anymore, to open your heart.” Subsequent stories carry forward the same theme, as their protagonists drift through relationships with abandon, often ending up like Ellen in “City Life,” who “felt like something washed ashore after a shipwreck” after succumbing to a perfunctory seduction.

The slighter stories of the middle section project an autumnal ambience, as indifferent men seeking to maintain their emotional distance close down relationships before they become too involved. In “The Feather in the Toque,” a bird that has unwittingly flown into the house becomes the metaphor for the girl who makes plans to extricate herself from such static relationships, with her only satisfaction being her plan to leave behind some small item as a warning to the next woman that others have preceded her.

“The Knot,” which sketches the dissolution of a relationship through a series of conversational vignettes, is typical of the final group of stories. While the man is unable to provide the woman with the concentrated attention she desires and accuses her of craving unhappiness, even after they separate and establish equilibrium in new relationships, she discovers that her attraction to him still remains. “A Thrilling Life” perhaps best depicts Minot’s female characters’ tendency to seek men who will inevitably fall short of their hopes, even in the aftermath of a relationship that has failed for similar reasons. As the story’s narrator confesses, her partner, Frank Manager,was not a candidate for the long run. He might just as well have been wearing a banner which said FRIVOLITY. It was just what I was looking for.

Intrigued by his thrilling life, his tendency to be easily annoyed, and the rage that lurks beneath his charm, she sets herself up for jealousy and disappointment, even as she attempts to reason away her emotions and expect less.

Ultimately, Minot’s female characters resign themselves to fatalistic acceptance that desire’s vagaries will lead them astray, deluding themselves—as does the narrator of “The Man Who Would Not Go Away”—that they can settle for “one of those loose easy things.” Thus, they drift through relationships, emotionally wounded and perpetually unfulfilled. As “dispatches from the sexual wars,” Time‘s reviewer remarks, Minot’s stories show that “the news is not good for either side.”