RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksStories is a memoir built of anecdote and digression, paragraphs skipping like stones from one liquid moment to the next. The method is gestural, not comprehensive, and the book clocks in at a slight 94 pages. Gallagher works in swift, fizzing movements; each chapter is a sketch, not a painting. Mockingbirds build a nest on her terrace in a few brief lines and are dispatched (by a hawk, alas) at paragraph’s end. When they return later in a single tangential sentence, the moment is as light as a stray mark, the smudge that makes the picture whole ... The past is interrupted by the present; a life-drenched reminiscence is undercut by the parenthetical fact of death — but death, too, can be interrupted. In Stories , it is the past that cuts in on the present, waltzing the narrative away into scenes long gone, rooms long left, conversations begun and ended many years ago.
Benjamin Taylor
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksTaylor resurrects Roth largely through quotation; long swathes of conversation make up most of the book ... I was skeptical, as I often am when reading scene-driven memoirs, of the pages upon pages of quotation, the whole paragraphs of Roth’s winsome ranting conveyed, supposedly, verbatim. But my doubt was somewhat mollified by Taylor’s mention, in a brief aside, of jotting down a line as soon as he reasonably could ... The reading experience is sumptuous and over too soon, like life at its best; I didn’t want the party to end, the guests to go ... Held up to the light by Taylor, the thin-skinned Roth proves to be translucent as stained glass, a Jewish patron saint of rage and writing.
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