Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Amy Bloom, 2010
Random House
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812977806
Summary
Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom's astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship.
Propelled by Bloom's dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people's lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe.
Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, "Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.". (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1953
• Education—B.A. Weslyan University; M.S.W. Smith College
• Awards—Costa Award
• Currently—lives in Connecticut, USA
Amy Bloom is the author of Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; and Normal. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad.
She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Bloom teaches creative writing at Yale University.
Bloom pubished her first novel, Away, in 2008. Another collection of stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, was published in 2010. (From the publisher.)
More
Trained as a social worker, Bloom has practiced psychotherapy and is currently a part-time lecturer of Creative Writing at the department of English at Yale University. Although not a psychologist, her involvement with psychotherapy played a role in writing the Lifetime Television network TV show, State of Mind, which takes a look at the professional lives of psychiatrists. Bloom is listed as one of the writers for the series and a co-executive producer.
Bloom received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, and a M.S.W. (Masters of Social Work) from Smith College. Bloom is divorced and has two daughters and a son. She resides in Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Given the range of both narratives, this work of extravagantly fine fiction cannot really be called a short-story collection. It's more of a reunion, or a set of successfully completed jigsaw puzzles. Each of the two quartets has been pieced together into a time-traveling novella filled with hindsight and passion and ever-evolving emotions. This book also includes four free-standing stories that have nothing to do with one another. But even if its format were more commonplace, Where the God of Love Hangs Out would still be something special. Ms. Bloom's characters are uncommonly fully formed, seldom young, some of them well into old age. Yet they sustain the ability to surprise one another—and themselves.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Bloom...vividly chronicles the inner lives of people caught in emotional and physical constraints—illnesses they are striving to survive, regrets they are trying to allay, desires they often dare not fulfill. She writes in beautifully wrought prose, with spunky humor and a flair for delectably eccentric details. Her narrative talents include a fine touch with flashbacks, which she handles as suavely as any writer I can think of. Her gift for dialogue is equally terrific.... Brava, Ms. Bloom. Send us an equally sly, dashing book very soon, please.
Francine du Plessix Gray - New York Times Book Review
An antidote to the testosterone-laced worldview. These are quiet, well-executed tales of love, loss and family.
Sarah L. Courteau - Washington Post
Bloom's latest collection (after novel Away) looks at love in many forms through a keenly perceptive lens. Two sets of stories that read much like novellas form the book's soul; the first of which revolves around two couples—William and Isabel, Clare and Charles—and begins with Clare and William falling into an affair that endures divorces, remarriage and illness. Bloom has an unsettling insight into her character's minds: Clare's self-disgust is often reflected in her thoughts about William, demonstrating the complexity of their attraction as their comfort with each other grows, until she finally accepts the beauty of what they have—albeit too late. The second set of stories, featuring Lionel and Julia, is more complicated; the death of Lionel's father propels Lionel and Julia together in a night of grief, remarkable (and icky) mostly because Julia is Lionel's stepmother and his father's widow. As years go by, it is unclear whether Lionel's difficulties are due to that indiscretion, but watching Bloom work Lionel, Julia and her son through the rocky aftermath is a delight. The four stand-alone stories, while nice, have a hard time measuring up against the more immersive interlinked material, which, really, is quite sublimey.
Publishers Weekly
Bloom's new collection features two sets of connected stories that characterize the far-reaching trajectory of love within memorable groups of characters. In one grouping, William and Clare, literature professors in two parallel marriages, are drawn to each other in middle age after years as highly compatible friends. In the other, Lionel, the adolescent son of a well-known jazz musician, and Julia, recently widowed from that musician, are forced to redefine their relationship in the face of the man's death. In both sequences, realignments between children and adults are unpredictable but deeply felt. Verdict: The characters from the two sets of linked stories are so engaging that the inhabitants of the four strong stand-alone entries feel like mere walk-ons. Readers of Bloom's earlier collections will be happy to reencounter some of the characters they've already met, as two of the stories are from Come to Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. An eminently readable new collection. —Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA
Library Journal
Nine uncollected stories plus three that appeared in earlier collections are interestingly arranged and recombined in this latest from the Manhattan psychotherapist and versatile author (Away, 2008, etc.). The first four chronicle the adulterous relationship, then the sad late-life marriage of 50-somethings Clare and William, who find amorous moments together during shared vacations and visits to and with each other's unsuspecting spouses. Bloom's plainspoken, witty prose is displayed to fine effect in unglamorous snapshot revelations of self-indulgent, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen William and weary, unillusioned Clare (who sardonically asks herself, "What has it ever been between them but the rubbing of two broken wings?"). Four other interrelated stories span years of familial and less conventional love between Julia, a music journalist who becomes a black jazz musician's third wife, then his widow, and his son and namesake Lionel, a biracial heartthrob who is drawn much too closely into intimacy with his grieving stepmother. Except for the last of these four, in which Lionel is both further injured and paradoxically healed by his weakness and guilt, this is an original and moving dramatization of the complex burdens of togetherness and independence, soaring ambition and muted resignation. The remaining unrelated stories-which seem to belong in another book-are a mixed bag. "Permafrost" suggestively links a hospital social worker's compassionate identification with a young girl's sufferings to the former's lifelong fascination with the historic Shackleton Arctic expedition. "Between here and here" and "By-and-By" deal somewhat melodramatically with family-related traumas. But in the wry title story, stoic survival is persuasively incarnated in a saturnine widower who takes botched relationships, failing bodily functions, even "women OD'ing on coke in front of their children" phlegmatically in stride. Not Bloom at her very best, but impressive enough confirmation of this clever writer's ability to challenge the way we see ourselves and to show us as we are.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Bloom chose to tell the stories of Lionel and Julia and William and Clare through a collection of interlocking stories? Does this device allow Bloom to reveal something that a single story or the novel form would not? Can you read the stories individually, or must they be read only as a collection?
2. What do the titles of these stories tell us about what is going on below the surface? For example, what does “The Old Impossible” suggest about William and Clare’s love? Or “Night Vision” about Lionel and Julia’s relationship?
3. In these stories, Bloom explores love in many forms— old friendships, marriage, parenthood. What are some of the other types of love relationships found in these stories? Which ones are unexpected? Which are forbidden or secret?
4. Which characters transgress the boundaries of their relationships with other characters? How do these transgressions change the nature of the relationship? Which actions damage a relationship forever? Which relationships cannot be repaired? What price do they pay for their transgressions?
5. Many of Bloom’s characters play multiple roles—mother, sister, daughter, wife, lover. Do these roles, such as husband or wife, provide safety? If so, what happens when these labels are undermined? Explore the many roles assumed by William and Clare at the beginning of their relationship— not only with each other but also with the other characters. How do these roles change by the end of “Compassion and Mercy”?
6. Does love change over time? What is the nature of love in the second half of life? How does love toward the end change our understanding of its beginning? In “Between Here and Here,” the daughter undergoes a transformation in her understanding of her father as he ages. How do you understand his change in behavior and her feelings toward him? How do Lionel’s feelings about Julia evolve as she ages?
7. Many love stories explore only the mysteries and wonders of love, but Bloom goes further and often writes about love’s darker side. What are some of the casualties of love in these stories? What happens when love ends, either by choice or, which it always does, death?
8. Many of the most important scenes in these stories happen around the dinner table as the characters share a meal or a drink. What role does food play in each of the stories? How do we understand William and Clare sharing nectarines in “The Old Impossible”? Or Lionel teaching Buster to eat a peach in “Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous”? How does the family Thanksgiving tradition evolve over the Lionel and Julia stories, and what does this reveal about the family?
9. What are some of the secrets kept in these stories? How do secrets affect love? How do they define the love relationships?
10. In the story “Where the God of Love Hangs Out,” Ray and Ellie remind each other that they vowed to love each other “for better or for worse.” Do you agree that love must be able to contain both? What were some of the “for betters” in these stories? What were some of the “for worses”?
11. In Bloom’s stories, it is the small acts of everyday love and intimacy that mean the most between two people. What are some examples from this collection?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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