Susan Minot is an author well reputed for the purity and terseness of her prose exhibited over a career of more than three decades. Her latest book, a collection of ten stories is no exception ... Minot excels in description of people and places ... Two of the stories in the collection do not work as well as the others ... Minot has interesting messages tucked into her stories. Interior musings of the characters. Thoughts worth further thought ... The most satisfying stories in the collection are the longer ones ... In contrast to Lust and Other Stories in which most of the characters are young, glib, and not particularly thoughtful, the current collection of tales has greater resonance, the characters are older, have lived more, have more to say. As a result, the stories are a much more rewarding read.
... as quiet as Lust is loud ... Not every story in the new book works. 'Café Mort' is an improbable excursion into the supernatural, a latter-day fable that never establishes its rules or finds its footing. 'The Torch' smolders but doesn’t catch. 'Listen,' written entirely in bits of unattributed dialogue, is about the 2016 presidential election and grief at the outcome thereof, but I was unable to determine whether Minot was lampooning a certain strain of liberal teeth-gnashing or indulging in it herself ... The title story, also told in fragments, is a more successful experiment — almost giddily grim, with echoes of Beckett and David Markson ... I said before that Why I Don’t Write is a quiet collection, but it is not a halting or timid one. Minot still has a poet’s instinct for the surprising volta, the striking image, the bracing final line. After 30 years away from the short story, it is good to have her back, cleareyed and fearless as ever, whispering difficult truths and ambiguities that a less assured writer would feel compelled to shout.
It is hard to describe what this collection is about; the core seems to be elusive, but some themes loosely congregate—broken relationships, love, and loss. Stories reappear in different forms ... In an interview with Donald Friedman in 2002, Minot said that her books are always guided by images. How it looks, she says, is what is most important for her to convey. In a true reflection of that, Minot’s collection is strikingly visual. Here, the light is often white, people’s heads are bullet-shaped, and the littered car of a scoundrel professor is a fish tank. At their best, the sentences are frozen frames peering at the reader, as the reader peers back, peeling new information with each read ... While the stories meander, they also spill with luscious sentences that scintillate...
...long overdue but also well worth the wait. This time, instead of focusing solely on romantic relations, Minot’s tales embrace a number of themes and even a range of styles. What links them and those from before is a winning blend of emotional intensity, capricious playfulness and keen-eyed observation ... Minot has mixed success with her more experimental stories: One resembles a rough draft of dialogue from an abandoned Samuel Beckett play; another strives to be a ghoulish comedy, except that the joke quickly wears thin ... But it is the title story that is the most inventive and the most beguiling.
Why I Don’t Write: And Other Stories, her first in some 30 years, showcases her versatility. Its 10 stories range from mainstream to experimental, with sundry stops in between ... She has an unmistakable knack for distilling things, and gorgeously, at that ... In this collection, Minot also flirts with suspense, as well as surreal humor ... Taken as a whole, Minot’s collection is, by turns, spiky and intimate, adventurous, stark and lyrical ... few story collections shine as brightly.
In American short fiction of the past 50 or 60 years, there is to my ear a certain distinct prose style that a lot of creative writing types work hard to emulate ... They’re told in carefully contrived, subject-verb-object grammatical structures that repeat throughout the narrative. The effect of the sentences is that of flat objectivity, even emotionlessness ... A story that starkly unfolds...is 'The Language of Cats and Dogs' ... It is an affecting, emotionally probing story, either in spite of or because of the spare style it’s told in ...'Boston Common at Twilight'...[is] for my money the other really memorable story here ... This, like most of the other nine stories in the collection, is given in flat, hyper-objective, skillfully revealing prose ... 'Café Mort,' meanwhile, a more conventional narrative, is...my favorite story in the book. Another way of describing Why I Don’t Write is to say it is very urban, upscale fiction. If you have a taste for, or an ambition to, the New Yorker and its literary environs, you’ll probably like these stories.
...a mixed bag ... The most successful show why sustained engagement matters, especially for a writer like Minot whose gift is for illuminating revelatory moments in characters' lives rather than experimental fiction ... Throughout, Minot is keenly aware of how men hurt women—as well as how women sabotage themselves ... This collection's best stories show us why Minot should resist irony and never stop writing beautifully about women's lives.
Minot...finds hints of violence, grief, and trauma in her characters’ interior lives in this precise, shimmering collection ... Amid the conventional narratives are shorter, fragmentary stories. Of these, only the title story stands out, in which a constant, distracting stream of information passes through the narrator’s consciousness.
