Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5017692 in Books
• Published on: 2011-01-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 194 pages

From Publishers Weekly
An easy bet for one of the year's 10 best collections, Clayton's second book of stories (after Bodies of the Rich) struggles repeatedly to "invite God into a 'realistic' story," usually the story of a successful Jewish man like Peter Weintraub, a recurring character who, in "The Man Who Saw Radiance," one day looks at his secretary, sees "a life intended to stay secret, even from herself" and, as a result of his insight, watches his own existence fall apart. This theme is repeated, with fascinating variations throughout the collection: the dangerous intuition of a life kept secret, even from the self, is Clayton's true subject. Like Bernard Malamud (a writer whose best work this collection recalls), Clayton risks sentimentality, but the risk is exhilarating; he writes precariously, in what seems a state of grace, while his "God-disturbed" characters teeter through quasi-religious ecstasy into what even they recognize as mawkishness and isolation, each one like an "addict, who'd felt the rich fabric of life through his drug and then, his blood neutralized, felt nothing." The compromise between divine presence and worldly distraction gives Clayton's decalogue a suspense, sadness and irony rare in contemporary fiction. With neither a perfect ear for dialogue nor a particularly keen sense of plot, Clayton more than atones for those shortcomings with perfect sentences in a voice unmistakably his own.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
paper 0-8142-0780-4 A second collection from English professor (U. of Mass.) and critic Clayton, the first winner of the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction. Clayton's new volume is, in many ways, a maturing of the concerns of his previous collection. As in Bodies of the Rich (1984), he focuses on the minutiae of daily life as a reflection of the ways in which his intelligent, middle-class protagonists express and experience loss. In Radiance, the protagonists are almost all Jews, assimilated to varying degrees but aware of and generally comfortable with their ethnic/religious identity. What they arent comfortable with is their lives--marriage as an act of settling for less, marriages that are failing or have long since dissolved, friends and family who die, parents who commit suicide. For several of his low-key heroes--in ``Glory,'' ``Open-Heart Surgery,'' and the most fully realized piece here, ``The Man Who Could See Radiance''--coping with loss takes the form of a sort of magic realist device in which people see and feel beyond their senses, becoming aware of a larger presence that may be understood as having a religious significance. The use of this device in three stories out of only ten, though, makes for a certain repetitiveness. Two tales, ``Muscles'' and ``Time Exposure,'' about episodes in an unhappy marriage that involves the husband's domineering brotherall as experienced by the couples sonhave the feeling of sketches for a novel-in-progress; theyre affecting but seem unfinished. Still, Clayton's best, ``Talking to Charlie'' and ``History Lessons,'' have a poignance that comes from an intense sensitivity to the quiet suffering that most often goes unexpressed in the rush of daily life. Uneven but distinctive short fiction from an author with a genuine gift. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
...[Clayton writes] with compassion, simplicity and power... -- The New York Times Book Review, Patrick Farrell