It was Henry James who first claimed the imagination of disaster, but in Amy Bloom's stunning second collection, she appears to have inherited the mantle. Most of the characters in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You are pursued by at least one of the biological furies: cancer, miscarriage, Parkinson's disease. And even those with their health intact tend to be sick at heart, having run the gantlet of family life and suffered what the military men like to call friendly fire. Yet the effect of these brilliant stories is anything but dreary. Instead they produce an odd sense of elation--Bloom somehow persuades us that her characters will continue under their own steam long after we've closed the book, and she alternates hope and hopelessness in exactly the right, recognizable proportions.

Take the title story, in which a middle-aged mother is determined to see her daughter through the rigors of a sex-change operation. Jane puts up a good front, almost but not quite earning the title of Transsexual Mom of the Year, and supports her "handsome boy-girl" every step of the way. Yet the strain shows. And when she meets a supernaturally nice man, she can't quite credit her good fortune--even his appearance at her door with an armload of flowers touches off a fresh round of ambivalence: And standing on the little porch of the condo, barely enough room for two medium-size people and forty-eight roses, Jane sees that she has taken her place in the long and honorable line of fools for love: Don Quixote and Hermia and Oscar Wilde and Joe E. Brown, crowing with delight, clutching his straw boater and Jack Lemmon as the speedboat carries them off into a cockeyed and irresistible future. The inclusion of Some Like It Hot's Joe E. Brown, who's gotten both more and less than he bargained for in his cross-dressing sweetheart, is a typically marvelous touch. And lest we think that Bloom has weighted the scales too heavily in favor of disillusion, Jane's new lover gets in the last word, citing the South Carolina state motto: "Dum spiro, spero.... While I breathe, I hope." Just keep breathing, the reader wants to say.

"Stars at Elbow and Foot" and "Rowing to Eden" are no less effective in their mingling of tragedy and sublime trivia. In two other stories, Bloom revives the Sampson clan, which she first introduced in Come to Me, and beautifully extends her mini-epic of mixed-race life without a grain of namby-pamby PC hesitation. And last but not least, there's "The Story," a tricky number in which Bloom seems to shoot to hell her own reputation for Chekhovian decency. Here we have a narrator who lies and dissembles, destroys her rival, and lives to tell the (metafictional) tale: "Even now I regard her destruction as a very good thing, and that undermines the necessary fictive texture of deep ambiguity, the roiling ambivalence that might give tension to the narrator's affection." In the end, though, Bloom is simply too gifted a writer to banish all seven types of ambiguity from her work. She understands that we are hopelessly divided creatures and cuts us the necessary, unsentimental slack. Or to put it another way, she forgives all--but forgets nothing. --James Marcus


From Publishers Weekly
Some of the power of her fiction (Love Invents Us, etc.) comes from Bloom's mastery of the writing craft; more arises from the empathy for human frailty exhibited by this author, who also works as a psychotherapist. Here, eight stories shed insight on the healing properties of love, experienced through unexpected epiphanies, ardent sacrifices and impulsive acts of forgiveness. Two tales concern a black man, Lionel, who one shameful night long ago slept with his white stepmother, Julia. In "Night Visions," Julia attempts to heal Lionel's guilt with kindness: "I love you past speech," she says, as maternal earth-mother rather than temptress. But in "Light into Dark," set six years and Lionel's two divorces later, he still carries "a knot in his heart," so Julia succors Lionel's stepson instead. The narrator in "Stars at Elbow and Foot," the collection's most outstanding story, has lost her baby at birth. Her sardonic voice charts depthless despair, until she opens her heart to a stunted, armless little boy who's even more cynical about life and emotionally guarded about commitment than she is. Another suffering character is the teenaged narrator of "Hold Tight," furious that her smart, talented, beautiful mother is dying of cancer, bitter that her own youth is vanishing at the same time. Here, too, there is a quiet healing, administered by her bereaved father. The protagonist of the title story is a single mother who shepherds her cherished daughter through the teenager's keenly desired sex-change operation, and finds her own heart healing in the process. And even when the will to endure is merely a day-by-day triumph over despair, as in "The Story," Bloom invests her tales with numinous insights. 13-city author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Bloom, a practicing psychotherapist, brings great insight into human emotion in this, her third, book (after Love Invents Us). Here, varieties of love are explored to great effect. In the title story, a mother assists as her beloved child becomes a female-to-male transsexual. Two stories explore relationships between adult men and their vividly rendered widowed stepmothers. Each of the stories in the collection contains unexpected scenes that deliver poignant moments of pure pleasure. Particularly moving is "Stars at Elbow and Foot," in which a woman tries to cope with the death of her newborn baby and forms a relationship with an armless orphan. This beautiful book will warm the hearts of its readers; recommended for all libraries.-DJudith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Joan Smith
Bloom has confronted her characters with some wonderfully compelling circumstances.


From Booklist
It is difficult to know where to begin to praise this masterful collection of short stories by a practicing psychotherapist. The eight stories present very quirky modern situations, but the time frame and setting do nothing to diminish the universality and depth of the emotions expressed. A mother copes with her daughter's sex-change operation in the title story. A multiracial step-family, after 15 years apart, comes together in another story. In the final story, the narrator uncovers the mechanics of her craft of writing for a purpose and how what is therapeutic for one is not necessarily therapeutic for all. Bloom's characters suffer incredible loss; painful, debilitating disease; and tribulations of all sorts; but they are not destroyed. With tender, albeit sharp, sensibilities and ringingly precise use of language, the author affirms the absolute and essential need to heal, to survive, and to love. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
A second collection of eight gritty, wisecracking, rudely contemporary urban stories from the Connecticut psychotherapist and highly praised author (Come to Me, 1993; Love Invents Us, 1997).Bloom specializes in relationships threatened by their participants' retreats into their own interiors or destroyed by enigmatic acts of both God and wayward mortals. Her characters are sharp-witted, imperturbably bitchy (often Jewish) (mostly) women who say things like Happy Day of Atonement and straight men are for putting up sheetrock. And, in her most fully imagined pieces, she briskly pulls rugs out from under people crazy enough to think their lives are ordered and secure. There's the title story's single mother who meekly accepts accumulating evidence that her tomboyish daughter was meant to be a boy--and makes arrangements for the gender surgery that will alter her own life just as radically. There's also the rootless black man of the paired stories Night Vision and Light into Dark, whose single teenaged sexual experience with his white stepmother reshapes his life into a futile quest for commitment and self-respect. Even more affecting are the adulterous narrator of The Gates Are Closing, wryly monitoring her married lover's gradual surrender to the ravages of Parkinson's; the bereaved mother who finds through a Pediatric Volunteer Program an unlikely focus for her frustrated instinctual love (in Stars at Elbow and Foot); and especially the unconventional triangle of the superb Rowing to Eden, an icily compact story that accomplishes, in scarcely 20 pages, replete and resonant characterizations of a dispassionate cancer victim, her helplessly sweet and attentive husband, and the lesbian friend whose selfless love for them both breeds in her a strength beyond their understanding.Bloom's precisely observed, rhetorically nervy stories sometimes strain our credulity--but they burrow unerringly into her people's damaged hearts and worried minds with intensity every bit as compassionate as it is clinical. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Amy Bloom's work takes ordinary lives under examination and discovers the strange elements that render no life ordinary. Her characters and situations give the sense of things happening for the first time to inimitable individuals."            

---Robert Stone


"Amy Bloom is possessed of great subtlety and rock-solid integrity. Her stories crackle with subvert revelation. She is a compassionate writer who, more important, loves the world too much to sentimentalize it."                          

---Michael Cunningham


"Amy Bloom's masterful stories take place at the point where love and desire collide with convention. At once achingly funny and heartbreaking, these stories live on long past the print and the page."                                  

---Jane Hamilton

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form.

Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on convincing us that her stories are not harmless; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend, all discovering that their lifelong triangle is not what they imagined; a man and his stepmother engaged in a complicated dance of memory, anger, and forgiveness. Amy Bloom takes us straight to the center of these lives with rare generosity and sublime wit, in flawless prose that is by turns sensuous, spare, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny.

These are transcendent stories: about the uncertain gestures of love, about the betrayals and gifts of the body, about the surprises and bounties of the heart, and about what comes to us unbidden and what we choose.

FROM THE CRITICS

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

A collection of short stories from award-winning writer Bloom. Our booksellers found the "subject matter too bizarre," but still found the "writing good."

Publishers Weekly

Some of the power of her fiction (Love Invents Us, etc.) comes from Bloom's mastery of the writing craft; more arises from the empathy for human frailty exhibited by this author, who also works as a psychotherapist. Here, eight stories shed insight on the healing properties of love, experienced through unexpected epiphanies, ardent sacrifices and impulsive acts of forgiveness. Two tales concern a black man, Lionel, who one shameful night long ago slept with his white stepmother, Julia. In "Night Visions," Julia attempts to heal Lionel's guilt with kindness: "I love you past speech," she says, as maternal earth-mother rather than temptress. But in "Light into Dark," set six years and Lionel's two divorces later, he still carries "a knot in his heart,'' so Julia succors Lionel's stepson instead. The narrator in "Stars at Elbow and Foot," the collection's most outstanding story, has lost her baby at birth. Her sardonic voice charts depthless despair, until she opens her heart to a stunted, armless little boy who's even more cynical about life and emotionally guarded about commitment than she is. Another suffering character is the teenaged narrator of "Hold Tight," furious that her smart, talented, beautiful mother is dying of cancer, bitter that her own youth is vanishing at the same time. Here, too, there is a quiet healing, administered by her bereaved father. The protagonist of the title story is a single mother who shepherds her cherished daughter through the teenager's keenly desired sex-change operation, and finds her own heart healing in the process. And even when the will to endure is merely a day-by-day triumph over despair, as in "The Story," Bloom invests her tales with numinous insights. 13-city author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Bloom, a practicing psychotherapist, brings great insight into human emotion in this, her third, book (after Love Invents Us). Here, varieties of love are explored to great effect. In the title story, a mother assists as her beloved child becomes a female-to-male transsexual. Two stories explore relationships between adult men and their vividly rendered widowed stepmothers. Each of the stories in the collection contains unexpected scenes that deliver poignant moments of pure pleasure. Particularly moving is "Stars at Elbow and Foot," in which a woman tries to cope with the death of her newborn baby and forms a relationship with an armless orphan. This beautiful book will warm the hearts of its readers; recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/00.]--Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

School Library Journal

Some of the power of her fiction (Love Invents Us, etc.) comes from Bloom's mastery of the writing craft; more arises from the empathy for human frailty exhibited by this author, who also works as a psychotherapist. Here, eight stories shed insight on the healing properties of love, experienced through unexpected epiphanies, ardent sacrifices and impulsive acts of forgiveness. Two tales concern a black man, Lionel, who one shameful night long ago slept with his white stepmother, Julia. In "Night Visions," Julia attempts to heal Lionel's guilt with kindness: "I love you past speech," she says, as maternal earth-mother rather than temptress. But in "Light into Dark," set six years and Lionel's two divorces later, he still carries "a knot in his heart,'' so Julia succors Lionel's stepson instead. The narrator in "Stars at Elbow and Foot," the collection's most outstanding story, has lost her baby at birth. Her sardonic voice charts depthless despair, until she opens her heart to a stunted, armless little boy who's even more cynical about life and emotionally guarded about commitment than she is. Another suffering character is the teenaged narrator of "Hold Tight," furious that her smart, talented, beautiful mother is dying of cancer, bitter that her own youth is vanishing at the same time. Here, too, there is a quiet healing, administered by her bereaved father. The protagonist of the title story is a single mother who shepherds her cherished daughter through the teenager's keenly desired sex-change operation, and finds her own heart healing in the process. And even when the will to endure is merely a day-by-day triumph over despair, as in "The Story," Bloom invests her tales with numinous insights. 13-city author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Megan Harlan - Entertainment Weekly

...witty, whip-smart and deeply moving...as Bloom offers quirky, searching analyses of how people adapt to life-transforming change, her writing is anything but clinical...Bloom's tales are an exotic variety, blossoming with humor, empathy and insight.Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Amy Bloom's masterful stories take place at the point where love and desire collide with convention. At once achingly funny and heartbreaking, these stories live on long past the print and the page. — Jane Hamilton

I had a wonderful time reading Amy Bloom's stories. They're as fresh as paint, and full of surprises, skill and wit. — Alice Adams

Amy Bloom's work takes ordinary lives under examination and discovers the strange elements that render no life ordinary. Her characters and situations give the sense of things happening for the first time to inimitable individuals. — Robert Stone

Ruth Coughlin

I feel as though before discovering Amy Bloom, I was lost, and now I'm found. — Detroit News

Amy Bloom writes about love and desire with more visceral power than anyone i know. — Dorothy Allison

The highest compliment i can pay a writer is to say that her work is Chekhovian - which is to say that its fine, fierce intelligence is matched by its compassion. — Rosellen Brown

Amy Bloom writes about love in prose as pure and polished as river-washed stone. And such is her wisdom that, in reading about a woman who has done nothing I ever did, I felt I was reading about myself. — Phyllis Rose

Amy Bloom is possessed of great subtlety and rock-solid integrity. Her stories crackle with subvert revelation. She is compassionate writer who, more important, loves the world too much to sentamentalize it. — Michael Cunningham