May 15, 2002
Unlike his novels, most of which fit solidly in the noir tradition and are crackling with kinetic energy, Gifford's short stories are reflective, often elegiac--small moments placed under a microscope. In "My Last Martini," for example, which is one of several stories here to have appeared in previous collections, the narrator listens quietly as an unknown woman on the next barstool tells the story of her family's legacy of sexual dysfunction. The flatness of the narrative style, while seeming to mask emotion, actually manages to heighten the reader's sense of turmoil below the surface. That turmoil takes center stage in a noirish novella, " The Lonely and the Lost," which has more in common with Gifford's novels, including " Wild at Heart" (1989), than it does with the other stories collected here. Whether passion and violence erupt in surrealistic bursts or roil silently under a placid surface, however, Gifford's insistently idiosyncratic fiction never fails to surprise, jolting us into recognizing the mundane in the midst of the surreal or forcing us to confront tragedy in an empty martini glass.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)