Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1054847 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Released on: 2005-09-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The eight stories of Ingalls's latest collection feature elaborate plots and surprising, if sometimes inconclusive, resolutions. The highlight is the opener, "Last Act: the Madhouse," a delicious take on extravagant operatic tragedy. An opera-loving teenager falls for, and impregnates, a girl of whom his parents don't approve; the parents' sneaky, twisted response to the situation destroys the relationship. Years later, after discovering his parents' treachery, the young man goes mad; his ex-lover's fate is similarly unfortunate. In the sly, comic "Somewhere Else," a married couple, both travel agents, look forward to a free trip, only to discover that their journey has no end. "Veterans" tells how Sherman, a depressed alcoholic Korean War vet, inserts himself, with increasing menace, into the happy family life of the soldier who saved him, while "No Love Lost" is a dark, creepy tale of the brutalities of life after war. Rich narratives and characters who change over their course make many of the stories feel more like novellas, and Ingalls's command of her varied worlds—from bucolic small town to renegade postwar countryside—is impressive. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
There are some writers who, you feel, should be universally famous and who, mystifyingly, are not. Fellow writers and loyal fans read Rachel Ingalls's sly, inventive, intelligent work with enormous admiration and complain about the gaps in time that separate the publication of her books, at least in this country. (Born here, Ingalls lives and writes in London.) Only one of her novels, Mrs. Caliban, the story of a forlorn housewife whose lonely life is brightened by visitations from a sort of monster, achieved popular success here, while the others (most notably, the marvelous Binstead's Safari) seem like secrets passed from one devoted reader to another. Her new story collection, Times Like These, at once raises your hopes that this regrettable situation will be remedied and reminds you of the possible explanations for why this might not occur. While so many readers demand that characters be sympathetic, that plots be morally uplifting, that endings be redemptive and that escapist fiction open a portal into a world brighter than our own, Ingalls's work could hardly be darker. Though her stories often contain fanciful or supernatural elements, they are grounded, even mired, in very complex and difficult human realities: warfare, betrayal, deception, unhappy marriages and anxious alliances based on fear and mistrust.

You tear through Ingalls's stories with a more-than-willing suspension of disbelief, less interested in matters of plausibility and verisimilitude than in the seductions of pure narrative. Filled with surprising plot twists, guided by the frequent interventions of the deus ex machina that arises from the author's imagination, they keep us steadily turning the pages. And the chance that the dramatic arc may precipitously veer toward the supernatural -- the possibility that anything can happen -- makes them all the more intriguing. In one story, "Somewhere Else," a married couple, both travel agents, accept a bargain vacation offer that seems (and is) too good to be true and find themselves (as we could have predicted) trapped in an endless voyage from hell. In another tale, "The Icon," a man's obsession with a Greek painting that his grandfather may or may not have stolen (a theft that has cursed its original owners with generations of bad luck) leads to violence and tragedy.

Several of the stronger stories remain rooted in a more recognizable reality even as they explore the ways in which a character's fascination with the romantic and the uncanny can exert a powerful and inexplicable effect on so-called ordinary life. Married to a superstitious journalist in a story called "Correspondent," a jealous wife decides to test the efficacy of her husband's talismanic charms. In another story, "Last Act: The Madhouse," a young man obsessed with the high drama and poetry of Italian opera finds his own love life mimicking the sort of production in which a coloratura soprano winds up in a madhouse. "The traditions of stage madness demanded that the more crazed a girl became, the higher she sang," Ingalls writes. "Purity of tone would indicate the intensity of her love and pain. Another custom governed the color of her dress: it had to be white, and of a simple, shiftlike design. You were supposed to think it was her nightgown, and that she'd be too distracted to want to change her clothes, or perhaps to remember how to. Occasionally the nightdress resembled some sort of tattered bridal garment she'd put on under the impression that the hero would call for her in just a minute, to take her to church and make her his wife."

In "Veterans," one of collection's best and most fully developed stories, a disturbed war veteran arrives to upset the domestic contentment of a man who saved his life in battle. You can't help noting the resemblance between this story's sinister interloper and so many of Patricia Highsmith's sociopaths. And you can't help hoping that Ingalls, like Highsmith -- who, for a long time, was celebrated in Europe but relatively unknown in this country -- will at last receive the popularity and recognition that she deserves.

Reviewed by Francine Prose
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Ingalls' short fiction often elicits shudders as well as surprise. But there is less horror in these eight stories than in some of her earlier work; lives are altered, but they are seldom lost. (An exception is "No Love Lost," in which a family is torn asunder in a postwar world in which the old and infirm and occasional others are tossed into a quarry to die.) In both "Last Act: The Madhouse" and "Fertility," mothers go to unspeakable lengths to keep their sons from their pregnant girlfriends. Husband and wife travel agents find their free European jaunt was not what they bargained for in "Somewhere Else," and a soldier whose life was saved by another turns up years later to even the score in "Veterans." When the second wife of a famous correspondent learns he's dallying elsewhere, she fails to pack his lucky charms on his next trip to the war zone in "Correspondent." Ingalls' prose takes the reader seamlessly from the real to the surreal in these stories that burrow in memory. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved