... gray areas of emotion are where the stories in this collection thrive ... a tightly crafted collection of stories grappling with the power dynamics of couples with the women in these relationships often suffering for the benefit of the men. Sestanovich writes with precise prose and winnows the narratives into the most meaningful moments in the lives of her characters. Her skill as a storyteller is drawing out subtle emotional responses even as she crafts broader narratives.
The images that close...stories can have this kind of poetic reach, this upward tilt. If they sometimes feel a little strained, there’s a structural beauty, a hidden order 'containing' the wandering episodes. A remarkable talent is at work here ... Sestanovich has taken on the challenge of narrating lives cluttered with discontinuities, crowded with incomplete causes and effects, and she’s interested in what characters—who can only know so much—tell themselves about what’s going on. (The reader is left deducing a bit more.) There’s much to admire in the complications of these unplotlike plots, always hopping over the expected ... Rarely is anything in these stories less than convincing; she is precise about her characters’ often elusive emotions ... The exactness of such passages is elating. But readerly impatience can sometimes arise. This has to do with which experiences are stressed, which angles we get to view these characters’ lives from ... Though it tries not to, [one] story feels a bit pitiless ... All the same, there is a good deal to like about the heartlessness that tinges this fiction ... Here and there I found myself becoming the pesky reader offering secret disapproval ... Sestanovich...is already able to delineate in swift detail a narrow world, with its standards and shames and swindles, while indicating that she knows it’s not the whole world. This knowing is what gives the work its weight. And she has the power to subvert conventional story structure yet build a story with its own order.
The stories contain plot insomuch as real life contains plot: we make sense and meaning out of what we're given ... The book's tiny moments are what create layers atop the unexceptional ... With Sestanovich, the everyday is a little shinier ... Along with questioning their own bodies, the women in the collection question memory — which memories can they claim as their own? How will the present be remembered? Do they remember accurately? In Sestanovich's clear prose, these questions are subtle, soft, and casual ... Sestanovich's humor is subtle and earnest. Her characters take it all quite seriously but in the ways we all do.
Sestanovich writes with a kind of bracing cold-plunge clarity that Taylor's more elliptical prose tends to lack. But both tap into the peculiar, primal struggle of becoming who you are, and all the stories you have to tell yourself to get there.
The stories in Clare Sestanovich’s brilliantly crafted debut, Objects of Desire, which will be published by Knopf in June, wrestle with the realities of love, sexuality, desire, and the myriad intimacies—including disappointment and loss—that comprise women’s lives. The collection charts the experiences of women of different ages and sociocultural backgrounds as they come to terms, as the title implies, with the reality of their object of their desire ... Whether finally recognizing these objects for what they are—vessels for desire, containers we’ve filled with what we wished they held rather than what they actually contain—or finding ways to release ourselves from feeling the need to define ourselves through other people, each of the characters in these stories helps us realize the difference between what an authentic loving relationship is versus what one wants the relationship or situation to be ... Though to say that this book is only about desire and relationships is to miss how the stories in this collection act as a mirror, reflecting the day-to-day experiences of women. How the texture of life is also made up of the most mundane: conversations with children over the phone, teaching a class, walking to a bar to meet friends. For despite how powerfully the objects of our lives might obsess us or orient our attention, they are but one aspect of a larger lived experienced. This is as important to pay attention to as the permutations of love and loss. Sestanovich’s writing is clever and rich with layers, just like her characters. And the textures of her sentences are as nuanced as desire itself.
Sestanovich is an elegant writer whose stories deftly capture the foods, clothes and customs of contemporary life ... Over the 11 stories, told in a variety of different voices, we meet a large, angsty, mostly privileged cast of characters who nonetheless seem to reflect a society that’s been knocked back on its heels.
... sublimely polished ... Sestanovich’s heroines are surrounded by mess of one kind or another, but there’s nothing sloppy about them ... There’s plenty of mischief in these tales, and it’s particularly sharp when aimed at the literary scene ... At times, Sestanovich almost seems to be parodying the spareness of her chosen form and the volumes that it leaves unspoken ... These stories are nothing if not topical ... If it sometimes feels as if we get no closer to these immaculately drawn characters than the eavesdropper on the next table, it’s worth noting that they’re partly estranged from their own lives, or at least from the moments that Sestanovich captures so commandingly. In this way, her pleasurable, discrete dramas achieve something extra: along with their acute social observations and pithy elegance, they collectively probe the gap between how we’re seen and how we might long to appear.
... elegant and quietly captivating small-scale dramas filled with shrewd observations and emotional truth ... Sestanovich routinely entices readers with her intriguing opening lines ... Stories are enlivened by sharp details...and enriched by revealing gestures ... One or two of Sestanovich's tales drift from one uninvolving episode to another and yield little of interest or insight. The rest power along, illuminating lives made up of singular experiences, complex emotions and missed opportunities.
In this debut collection, Clare Sestanovich displays both an outsize gift for metaphor (over and again, the seemingly mundane arriving with arms full of meaning) and for what is not quite irony, but a kind of invisible running commentary: a flattering nudge to the reader that only deepens the effect ... Sestanovich is an extraordinary noticer. Carefully, sparely, she parses layers of feeling and attitude; of the tiny ways we admit or refuse love; of incremental, almost invisible, losses of self. She’s good at animating physical details, too, even though they can tip towards a calibrated, fastidious, distancing disgust ... it is sometimes hard not to feel, reading these stories, that one is in a self-aware hall of mirrors, the noticing noticing itself noticing, in infinite regression.
... 11 engaging stories ... tells the kind of subtle, graceful stories that often get overlooked ... There are no shocking plot twists or hypersardonic voices in Objects of Desire, just an astute chronicling of ordinary life that results in sharp and sometimes surprising tales of people in crisis or undergoing change. They are quiet dramas, rich with unique detail and moments of recognition. In shape and tone, there are echoes of writers such as Elizabeth Strout and Alice Munro, though the storylines have a more contemporary feel ... Stylistically, the writing is taut, full of short, staccato sentences. Some variation in length would add cadence, but it is a small point in a book brimming with original detail and insights ... These kinds of pithy, precise observations are on almost every page of Objects of Desire, a collection of small details that illuminate the big picture.
... pithy ... Sestanovich beautifully balances light and dark, humour and melancholy. She excells at dialogue, the tone droll ... Though dealing with messy subjects – misogyny, open marriages, authenticity, fame – Sestanovich’s prose remains poised. Her storytelling is clean and polished, underscoring the fine line between how we wish to be seen and how we appear. As these characters quietly unravel, yearning rubs up against misery.
There is an attention to detail that makes the stories in Clare Sestanovich’s Objects of Desire. Whether it’s noticing how thinly sliced the vegetables on a plate are, abstract wallpaper installed upside-down, or two characters’ knees nearly touching, it’s precise moments like these I appreciate as a reader. Those moments where you let the image settle, and next time you witness one of these details in your own life, you stop to appreciate it ... a debut collection of short stories from a writer who has honed the craft of writing. The sentences move seamlessly through the meticulousness of life ... The prose is confessional and intricate ... These are hardly 'quiet' stories. A more accurate description is a combination of intimate and vulnerable. Sestanovich writes with a delicate motif of bad decisions that bring out the humanity of these characters ... The character’s decisions are not always what we desire as a reader, but they are what the story needs to replicate the tragedy of everyday life.
The women in this acutely observed short story collection struggle to name the dull ache their lives seem to be permeated with ... f at times the stories feel a little too clinical, they still offer a master class in capturing the complexities of everyday life.
Short fiction populated by characters whose various longings remain unfulfilled ... These stories are restrained, nearly aloof, despite the fact that the characters are constantly and messily butting up against the futility of their desires ... Even in these emotionally wrenching scenarios, Sestanovich remains taciturn, offering the reader images and sentences of delicate beauty but leaving much, perhaps too much, unspoken. A collection shot through with crystalline moments but that ultimately holds readers at arm’s length.
Sestanovich’s intelligent debut collection demonstrates a gift for pithy detail that encapsulates the whole of a character’s personality or era of lived experience ... The collection finds cohesion around the quiet angst of mostly young, female narrators who long for experiences, other people, and states of being just beyond their grasp. These technically accomplished if not quite revolutionary stories demonstrate a high command of craft.
