Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Bloom) - Book Reviews

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