Equal Love - Softcover

Davies, Peter Ho

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862073236 ISBN 13: 9781862073234

Publisher: Granta Books, 2000

Synopsis

'Witty, intelligent . . . definitely a name to watch.' Scotland on Sunday In his new collection, prize-winning author Peter Ho Davies takes as his starting point the essential imbalance of the relationship between parent and child. Drawing on the author's own cross-cultural inheritance, these stories range across a series of settings and backgrounds. From a Chinese son gambling with professional mourners to a mixed-race couple who experience a close encounter with an alien being, Ho Davies' characters share an instantly recognizable sense of displacement - these are children of one century, adults of the next - caught between debts to their parents and what they owe their offspring. Sharply observed and compassionate, Equal Love imparts the talent of a truly original writer, whose work has already earned comparison with that of Raymond Carver, James Joyce and V. S. Naipaul. 'Smartly written and sweetly subversive.' Independent 'A set of delicate variations on the theme that love brings pain.Davies'.writing is poignant and humane.' Sunday Times 'This is Ho Davies on top form; funny, touching, off-beat. Like his first collection, Equal Love deserves the laurels.' Literary Review

About this title

Review

Peter Ho Davies takes his title for this, his second collection of short stories, from EM Forster, writing on the "sad, strange irony" whereby children are not bound to parents as parents are to children-and "equal love" is never possible. Davies' dozen pieces all focus on this vexed parent-child bond but it is to his credit that we're never aware of his master plan. For among Davies's many talents is the ability to create each story in its own world, with its own tone, pace and style, its own reference points--even its own vocabulary. The opening, deeply moving account of a childless couple's alleged encounter with a UFO, for example, can signal its 1950s US setting with the quiet placing of just three, era-specific words: "conniption", "simonize" and "prophylactics". Entering the Chinese-American world, preparing one of their own for "The Next Life", forces a cross-cultural reconsideration of what death and "sonhood" mean.

By the end of this emotionally complex, thoughtful book, Forster's despondent certainty about unequal love seems a sweeping simplification. Although Davies's own background--Welsh-Chinese parentage, raised in Coventry, teaching in Michigan, resident in Cambridge--explains at least some of the range, it takes real talent to conjure the first-person of a young girl losing her milk teeth or an "unfit mother" recalling the smell of her stolen child's nappies. Davies won plaudits and prizes for his first collection, The Ugliest House in the World; Equal Love fully vindicates his early promise and should find him a whole host of new admirers.--Alan Stewart

Review

"Degrees and permutations of estrangement from loved ones and homeland are examined with subdued emotion in this second collection (The Ugliest House in the World, 1997) from an author of unusually mixed (Chinese-Welsh) ancestry. The first of these 12 stories, The Hull Case, '' may be the best. Based on the true history of Betty and Barney Hill, it reshapes a reported incident of alien abduction into plaintive portrayal of an interracial New Hampshire couple whose story'' of their ordeal aboard a spaceship may just be an expression of their yearning toward a place where they can belong. A handful of the stories feel fragmentary, capable of much fuller development: for example Today is Sunday, '' in which a father and son sort out their wary relationship during a nursing home visit to the latter's senile grandmother; Sales, '' which seems to be Davies's version of Death of a Salesman''; and the title piece, a relentlessly terse revelation of the varieties of sexual attraction, fidelity, and truthfulness indulged by two married couples who've been longtime friends. Stories that benefit from Davies's economical, suggestive approach include Frogmen, '' a well-constructed portrayal of how a neighborhood full of preadolescent kids reacts to the disappearance of one of their friends, and Cakes of Baby, '' in which a tense Thanksgiving family get-together brings out the tensions in a sophisticated couple's childless marriage. Even better are On the Terraces, '' which dramatizes in carefully understated sentences the confused emotions felt by a young man keeping vigil as his beloved older brother lies dying of AIDS; and Small World, '' about a married insurance salesman's brief fling with an oldgirlfriend, which he recognizes as an effort to recapture and somehow alter his past. Interesting stories, full to bursting with promising unexplored further dramatic possibilities. It may be time for Davies to attempt his first novel."

"The characters who cross bordersin Davies' fictional landscapes are either British or American; the borders they cross are most often the boundaries of their marriages and families. In Davies' capable hands, these migrations are always meaningful and often surprising."

"Love is often called the great equalizer. That may be true in theory, but it's usually not how marriages work. The reality is that love is uneven and predictably non-transcendent, however much optimism a relationship contains. Clearly this comes as no surprise to Peter Ho Davies, who has followed his first book, "The Ugliest House in the World," a short-story collection that won the MacMillan Silver PEN Award and the John Llewellen Rhys Prize, with a collection pointedly titled "Equal Love."

"Mr. Davies writes with impressive skill....Mr. Davies can be at his best, in fact, when taking the most chances. The most moving and suggestive piece in the collection is also on the wild side. A middle-class black man, happily married to a white woman and living peacefully in a New England community, has his hapiness abducted by a visitation from aliens. Whether it is real or hallucinated is not clear, nor is it particularly important except that it leaves the reader a little off balance, a little exposed. What we are exposed to is universal: the vulnerability to outside blows of even the most loving human bonds."

"We infect our children with ideas about love. Peter Ho Davies hammers it home in these 13 stories, which show, in no uncertain terms, exactly how. Our explanations for divorce are inadequate ("We love you, but we don't love each other anymore"; therefore, the 6-year-old discovers, love is impermanent); the reasons we marry are inadequate and infinite; and our ideas about faithfulness are so various as to be equally inadequate. Children in Davies' stories climb to adulthood and parenthood with unusable scaffolding. One of my favorites is "The Hull Case," about a mixed-race couple abducted by aliens. As they report the incident to an army colonel, subtle questions of trust and credibility bubble up between the colonel, the black husband and the white wife. She is convinced that if she reveals everything about the abduction, she will be believed. He feels it is hopeless to expect that anyone will believe them; he isn't sure he believes it himself. How it feels to be doubted and denied trust is described with the same dignified precision Davies uses to describe the inner architecture of all his characters."

"EQUAL LOVE has many moments of humor and sweetness despite its somewhat wistful visioun of human happiness. Love itself is seldom parceled out equaly or deservedly. But the attempt to achiecve some sort of precarious balance affords Davies the opportunity for much thougtful storytelling."
Febrary 6, 2000

"I read EQUAL LOVE with great admiration. Davies' variations on a theme are brilliant, with very complex feelings, often indicated by seemingly small actions, so that the comparison with Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is justified (for once)."
-Penelope Fitzgerald, author of THE BLUE FLOWER, THE BOOKSHOP, etc.
"Peter Ho Davies' stories stand out in contemporary fiction for their clarity, wisdom, and compassion. They are beautifully written, filled with a kind of intelligence and generosity of temperament that is neither square nor predictable."
-Charles Baxter, author of BELIEVERS, FIRST LIGHT, and HARMONY OF THE WORLD
"Peter Ho Davies is a wonderful writer and these are wonderful stories: quietly dazzling, full of humour and humanity and the impossible compromises of love. EQUAL LOVE is a splendid collection."
-Margot Livesey, author of CRIMINALS, THE MISSING WORLD, and HOMEWORK
"The best thing about Peter Ho Davies stories is not his extraordinary language (it's gorgeous), or his complicated plotlines (they're so tight and perfect, they're undetectable), or his characters (varied and real and lovely). It's not even his wild and realized ambition. The best thing is that every one of the stories in _Equal Love_ is its own world, touching and funny and completely different from the last, and satisfying in a new way. He can do anything, and he does." -- Elizabeth McCracken, author of THE GIANT'S HOUSE and HERE'S YOUR HAT WHAT'S YOUR HURRY

"The subject matter of most of these stories--the small but also vast world of relationships--is well-traveled territory for short story writers. But Ho's own geographical history (born in England to Welsh and Chinese parents, now lives in the U.S.) helps give his work an original stamp. This collection demonstrates a familiarity with the often-subtle differences between daily life in the U.S. and the U.K., and Ho is equally at home when he sets "The Next Life" in San Francisco's Chinatown. With his variety of settings comes a variety of voices: the narrator of "Brave Girl," trying to help her father navigate the aftermath of divorce; a mathematician in "Small World," revisiting the scenes of his Irish-Catholic boyhood and his first love; a retired encyclopedia salesman who can't stop selling himself in "Sales"; a junkie trying to regain custody of her son in "Everything You Can Remember in 30 Seconds Is Yours to Keep." Ho manages to convey all his characters' predicaments with finesse, and his emotional and geographical range are equally wide." Mary Ellen Quinn, Copyright(c) 2000, American Library Association. All rights reserved Booklist, ALA
"Degrees and permutations of estrangement from loved ones and homeland are examined with subdued emotion in this second collection (The Ugliest House in the World, 1997) from an author of unusually mixed (Chinese-Welsh) ancestry. The first of these 12 stories, The Hull Case, '' may be the best. Based on the true history of Betty and Barney Hill, it reshapes a reported incident of alien abduction into plaintive portrayal of an interracial New Hampshire couple whose story'' of their ordeal aboard a spaceship may just be an expression of their yearning toward a place where they can belong. A handful of the stories feel fragmentary, capable of much fuller development: for example Today is Sunday, '' in which a father and son sort out their wary relationship during a nursing home visit to the latter's senile grandmother; Sales, '' which seems to be Davies's version of Death of a Salesman''; and the title piece, a relentlessly terse revelation of the varieties of sexual attraction, fidelity, and truthfulness indulged by two married couples who've been longtime friends. Stories that benefit from Davies's economical, suggestive approach include Frogmen, '' a well-constructed portrayal of how a neighborhood full of preadolescent kids reacts to the disappearance of one of their friends, and Cakes of Baby, '' in which a tense Thanksgiving family get-together brings out the tensions in a sophisticated couple's childless marriage. Even better are On the Terraces, '' which dramatizes in carefully understated sentences the confused emotions felt by a young man keeping vigil as his beloved older brother lies dying of AIDS; and Small World, '' about a married insurance salesman's brief fling with an old girlfriend, which he recognizes as an effort to recapture and somehow alter his past. Interesting stories, full to bursting with promising unexplored further dramatic possibilities. It may be time for Davies to attempt his first novel." Kirkus Reviews
"We infect our children with ideas about love. Peter Ho Davies hammers it home in these 13 stories, which show, in no uncertain terms, exactly how. Our explanations for divorce are inadequate ("We love you, but we don't love each other anymore"; therefore, the 6-year-old discovers, love is impermanent); the reasons we marry are inadequate and infinite; and our ideas about faithfulness are so various as to be equally inadequate. Children in Davies' stories climb to adulthood and parenthood with unusable scaffolding. One of my favorites is "The Hull Case," about a mixed-race couple abducted by aliens. As they report the incident to an army colonel, subtle questions of trust and credibility bubble up between the colonel, the black husband and the white wife. She is convinced that if she reveals everything about the abduction, she will be believed. He feels it is hopeless to expect that anyone will believe them; he isn't sure he believes it himself. How it feels to be doubted and denied trust is described with the same dignified precision Davies uses to describe the inner architecture of all his characters." The Los Angeles Times
"Mr. Davies writes with impressive skill....Mr. Davies can be at his best, in fact, when taking the most chances. The most moving and suggestive piece in the collection is also on the wild side. A middle-class black man, happily married to a white woman and living peacefully in a New England community, has his hapiness abducted by a visitation from aliens. Whether it is real or hallucinated is not clear, nor is it particularly important except that it leaves the reader a little off balance, a little exposed. What we are exposed to is universal: the vulnerability to outside blows of even the most loving human bonds." The New York Times
"I read EQUAL LOVE with greeat admiration. Davies' variations onnnnnn a theme are brilliant, with very complex feelings, often indicated by seemingly small actions, so that the comparison with Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is justified (for once)." -Penelope Fitzgerald, author of THE BLUE FLOWER, THE BOOKSHOP, etc.
"Peter Ho Davies' stories stand out in contemporary fiction for their clarity, wisdom, and compassion. They are beautifully written, filled with a kind of intelligence and generosity of temperament that is neither square nor predictable." -Charles Baxter, author of BELIEVERS, FIRST LIGHT, and HARMONY OF THE WORLD
"Peter Ho Davies is a wonderful writer and these are wonderful stories: quietly dazzling, full of humour and humanity and the impossible compromises of love. EQUAL LOVE is a splendid collection." -Margot Livesey, author of CRIMINALS, THE MISSING WORLD, and HOMEWORK
"The best thing about Peter Ho Davies stories is not his extraordinary language (it's gorgeous), or his complicated plotlines (they're so tight and perfect, they're undetectable), or his characters (varied and real and lovely). It's not even his wild and realized ambition. The best thing is that every one of the stories in _Equal Love_ is its own world, touching and funny and completely different from the last, and satisfying in a new way. He can do anything, and he does." -- Elizabeth McCracken, author of THE GIANT'S HOUSE and HERE'S YOUR HAT WHAT'S YOUR HURRY
"EQUAL LOVE has many moments of humor and sweetness despite its somewhat wistful visioun of human happiness. Love itself is seldom parceled out equaly or deservedly. But the attempt to achiecve some sort of precarious balance affords Davies the opportunity for much thougtful storytelling."
Febrary 6, 2000 The Chicago Tribune
"The characters who cross bordersin Davies' fictional landscapes are either British or American; the borders they cross are most often the boundaries of their marriages and families. In Davies' capable hands, these migrations are always meaningful and often surprising. " The San Francisco Chronicle
"Love is often called the great equalizer. That may be true in theory, but it's usually not how marriages work. The reality is that love is uneven and predictably non-transcendent, however much optimism a relationship contains. Clearly this comes as no surprise to Peter Ho Davies, who has followed his first book, "The Ugliest House in the World," a short-story collection that won the MacMillan Silver PEN Award and the John Llewellen Rhys Prize, with a collection pointedly titled "Equal Love." Newsday

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1862073236
• ISBN 13: 9781862073234
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272