This Is a Voice from Your Past: New & Selected Stories

By Merrill Joan Gerber

"Every woman gets a call like this sooner or later. The phone rings, a man says: 'This is a voice from your past.'" The opening of the compelling title story of Merrill Joan Gerber's collection sets... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865381135
• ISBN13: 9780865381131
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Ontario Review Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Publishers Weekly Review

[] This Is a Voice from Your Past: New & Selected Stories Gerber, Merrill Joan (Author) ISBN: 0865381135 Ontario Review Press Published 2005-01 Hardcover , $23.95 (200p) Short Stories (single author) Reviewed 2005-01-31 Veteran novelist, memoirist and short story author Gerber (Stop Here, My Friend) demonstrates her prowess in several of these compelling stories. The title tale is hands-down the most entertaining, thrusting readers into an established writer's life as she receives a call out of the blue from a college friend, Ricky, the most gifted writer in her class who somehow lost that "window of opportunity" to his success and is now transient and unstable. The narrator is married with small babies, a busy teacher of writing, who nonetheless welcomes the lost writer back into her life, but soon learns what a liability he is. In several of the stories, the suicide of the narrator's brother-in-law takes precedence. In "I Don't Believe This," first published in The Atlantic, two mature sisters take refuge from a menacing husband, who threatens to kill himself if his wife doesn't come back to him-and he eventually does, to everyone's amazement. The suicide reemerges in the story "My Suicides," an eerie recollection of deaths of friends, including a more detailed version of the abusive brother-in-law's suicide, which the narrator tries to comprehend: "And I, in my quiet home, with my children and my good husband, in my measured and reasoned life, became an accomplice to his fury." "Latitude," first published in the New Yorker, is a lovely, cut-and-dried drama of a young married woman enjoying her newly won power over her hateful in-laws, while the last story, "Dogs Bark," pursues the decade-long revenge that a couple endures living next to a family with obnoxiously loud dogs. Overall, Gerber demonstrates power in her prose style, skill in her characterizations-though there is some inconsistency in the narrative tone of the middle stories, which read like chapters of novels. Hers is a work of substance and intelligence. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review from the LA Times, Jan 17 2005

January 17, 2005 BOOK REVIEW Some shrewd but subtle observations about family This Is a Voice From Your Past: New and Selected Stories; Merrill Joan Gerber; Ontario Review Press: 220 pp., $23.95 By Merle Rubin, Special to The Times If, as critic A. Alvarez maintains, voice is the essence of good writing, Merrill Joan Gerber has a voice that is hard to forget: forceful, unvarnished, at times even vehement, a lot like Philip Roth's. Although Gerber may lack Roth's outrageous sense of humor, his sheer inventiveness and his free-ranging engagement with politics, society and culture, she is capable of the same kind of emotional intensity and raw power. And, when it comes to depicting the nuances of personal relationships, she can be shrewder, subtler and more telling. Indeed, few modern writers can match Gerber's portrayal of the strains, embarrassments and satisfactions of family life, the subject that has inspired her best work for the last four decades in novels such as "An Antique Man" and "King of the World" and in the many short stories she has written. Her latest story collection, "This Is a Voice From Your Past," offers a representative baker's dozen, some new, some previously published. Creative-writing teachers constantly tell students to write about what they know. Gerber certainly exemplifies this approach, and many of the stories in this collection demonstrate her gift for transforming personal experience into art. Originally published in the New Yorker, "We Know That Your Hearts Are Heavy" is narrated in the first person by Gerber's longtime fictional alter ego Janet, who in this story is still a recent newlywed living in Boston with her husband, Danny, a graduate student. Janet's favorite uncle has died, but her parents don't want her to go to the funeral. Tired of being sheltered by them, she insists. She is surprised, however, indeed "shocked," when Danny volunteers to come with her: "I had been imagining this as a private family affair. Danny does not like families, and he will not like mine. None of them are the kind of people we would have for friends, but I feel for them something akin to love, which makes them bearable, while Danny has no reason at all (except that I am his wife) to be tolerant of their crudities and illiteracies." In "Latitude" we meet the formidable in-laws of a Janet-and-Danny-like couple called Martha and Will. Although narrated in the third person, it is every bit as revealing. Gerber is superb at portraying characters in the grip of crude, harsh emotions, as in Martha's memory of how bitterly Will's parents had opposed their engagement: "His mother had turned purple. 'What right have you to ruin my son's life? Who do you think you are, trying to make a boy into a man. He's still a baby. Look at her!' she cried to her husband. 'Look how she holds his hand! Look at them!' " The raw stuff of fiction She is just as adept at portraying the subtlest of intimacies, as in this scene, where the now-p