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COME TO ME by Amy Bloom. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 177 pages. $10 paper.
As some Roman said about all Gaul, all book reviews should be divided into three parts.
Point One: Inside every short story writer there must be a novelist trying desperately to get out. Five of the 12 stories in Amy Bloom's first collection concern a specific pair of suburban American couples: their infidelities, children, horrors, coping strategies and moments of eerie transcendence. Why would one not spin such stories out into a fully fashioned novel instead of enisling them as the overgrown center of a slim book of slim tales? Is the novel too risky? Too constraining? Too passe? Too much? One might hazard a media analogy suggesting that novels are to movies as short stories are to television: that is, that the large palette of the silver screen is one thing but the idiotly boxed sitcom or drama is another, and less intimidating, thing indeed. Amy Bloom is certainly not alone in such a choice, of course, but when Faulkner, say, has Snopeses turning up all over the place or when Marlow keeps showing up...