My Favorite Lies: Stories

Rating:
Summary: "My Favorite Lies" Offers Only Truth
Review: Ann Beattie, watch out: you've got some serious competition. With razor-sharp wit and not a word wasted, Ruth Hamel deftly captures the quirks of ordinary people and in so doing makes them extraordinary--and fascinating. The prose in "My Favorite Lies" is so deliciously, audaciously precise that it makes you want to shout, leap up, and find someone to read these stories to. A friend who admires Hamel's talent as much as I do said that after reading "My Favorite Lies," he found himself viewing the world through her lens. Succeeding in getting us to see in a new and different way: isn't that the definition of art? I'm eagerly awaiting more from this seriously gifted writer, and am shocked that a major publishing house hasn't yet grabbed her. Maybe they have by now--I hope so.

Rating:
Summary: Epiphanies come hard.
Review: Epiphanies come hard. In Ruth Hamel's new book of 14 short stories, the reader meets a gaggle of neurotic thirty-and-forty-somethings who live in tight little mental cages, yet who are all yearning to break free. Few, however, are willing to give up the security of not knowing. In other words, they are ordinary people.
In the hands of a concept sculptor like Hamel, the stories engender pleasure through pain. "Kinded," for example, features two fortyish brothers who despise each other, competing even about their mutual inadequacies, negative memories, and social incompetencies. They reach an impasse on kvetching ghrough a stranger's act of kindess which results in the possibility, the mere possibility, of hope for a better future.
The narrator in the book's title story tells lies, ostensibly to soothe the hurts truth would bring. She is a furnitue refinisher who uses creative destruction to improve damaged goods. But her congenital "tact" is only a way of avoiding pain and, in the end, seems self-delusional. "Seems" is the operative verb for this author's work. Ambiguity is all.
Her stories are set in faceless high-rises, bedraggled factory towns, mildewed basements. They are filled with loathsome lovers, ex-drum majorettes, cast-off wives, nerds and George Costanzas. Hamel's world may even contain the sad truth, as one of the characters says, that life is content to let us pass unnoticed.
The epiphanies may be ambiguous. The pleasure of "My Favorite Lies" is not.

Sy Barasch