Smart and often witty ... Schulman creates an engaging cast of characters struggling to balance their desire for stable relationships with the allure of sexual adventure ... One of Fools for Love's strangest and most entertaining stories is My Best Friend ... Another brief but enjoyable entry is The Memoirs of Lucien H. ... In these and other stories, Schulman's characters make enough foolish and self-indulgent choices to fill a volume twice the size of this slim one. But that's the stuff of enjoyable fiction, and she delivers it with style here
Urgent, funny, and wistful ... Wrenching ... Most of the stories in Schulman’s volume share [a] thrilling, rebellious tone ... Even toddlers, those embodiments of fascistic, irrational will, refuse to be suppressed in the Schulman canon: The Memoirs of Lucien hilariously gives life to the inner monologue of an id-ruled mini-tyrant. With both visions and revisions and a constant battle between restlessness and resignation, Helen Schulman’s new collection makes willing fools for love of us all. Her wild inner heart reaches out to our own, and as she says, 'who wouldn’t want a piece of that?'
The Memoirs of Lucien H. is a hilarious baby-eyed view of Lucien’s mother’s chaotic life as she flirts hopefully with a potential new 'daddy' ... A couple of ghosts add an edginess to these stories whose spiky, sex-driven characters are all, definitely, fools for love.
Witty, polished, and deceptively casual ... Schulman’s fans should be tickled by these brief and breezy variations on themes of infidelity and insufficiently requited love, while newcomers to Schulman may be tempted by the stories to explore her considerable catalog of earlier work.
Many of Schulman’s characters have a perfectly good life, sometimes a life that’s a good bit beyond perfectly good. But you know what? They want more—love from people who either can’t or won’t give it, more attention, more sex, better sex ... This insatiable hunger certainly doesn’t make them admirable, and considering how far some of them push things, it doesn’t always make them relatable. However, it does make them fun to read about ... Two stories about diabolical toddlers are one too many, and the farcical My Best Friend is less funny than effortful. But the title story wonderfully captures a time and place—downtown Manhattan in the 80s. The standout of the collection, the piercingly lovely The Shabbos Goy. an account of a married Orthodox rabbi and a Gentile divorcée who meet on the streets of Paris and form a deep—brief—bond that includes reading and quoting Russian poetry to each other, feels fully developed and fully inhabited ... Even in the stories that don’t quite hit the mark, a sly wit is at work ... Schulman may not spare her characters what they have coming, but she feels for them. That counts for a lot.
Never underestimate the power of a good short story to lift your spirits ... Without attempting to be a novel in stories, the collection is free to go off on wild tangents, such as a story narrated by an evil baby, Lucien H., and a tale of forbidden love with a married Orthodox rabbi in Paris.
