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Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax with

by Susan Swan

Reading Susan Swan is often exhilarating. Her first novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, was a delight and, thankfully, the second half of Stupid Boys – “Cyber Tales” – has a similar sense of whimsy and quality of puckishness. The first half of this collection of short fiction – “Gutenberg Stories” – is more traditional.

For those readers who helped to make Swan’s previous book, The Wives of Bath, a bestseller, Mouse (the narrator of Wives), appears in six of the 11 stories in the first section. These stories suffer from a number of flaws. The most serious is cuteness. “The Stupid Boy Handbook” (of which the reader gets two versions) may well have been clever as dinner conversation, but in book form it is juvenile. By including the “handbooks” in this collection, Swan takes away from an intriguing literary character.

Swan does not excel at the more conservative form of writing she attempts in the Gutenberg section, and the content is either material Swan has previously covered or is too similar to material covered by others – Alice Munro or Audrey Thomas, to name two.

When Swan makes the quantum leap from movable block type to the World Wide Web, the “stories” become fascinating. “Cyber Tales” is based on a simple concept: what if Aphrodite, Ariadne, Marilyn Monroe, Catherine the Great, Newt Gingrich, the Boston Strangler, and Gertrude Stein, among others, all wrote each other e-mail? These tales are funny and biting. They’re all quite short – but for the last one – and have more in common with prose poems than with short stories, though they remain eminently accessible.

Swan has established herself in the last eight years as an author with sales potential. Stupid Boys, and in particular the “Cyber Tales” sections, marks a return of sorts to Swan the author of The Biggest Modern Woman. A writer of profound imagination. A return that is long overdue.

 

Reviewer: Marc Coté

Publisher: Somerville

DETAILS

Price: $24.95

Page Count: 282 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-895897-73-4

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1996-9

Categories: Fiction: Short