![]() ![]() ![]() It is the detachment of a good psychologist or a favorite aunt, the kind whose home you want to visit again and again. But where Didion’s detachment can feel ruthless, Pearlman’s is largely compassionate, sometimes even faintly amused. Perhaps there was something about growing up in the wake of the Great Depression and in the midst of World War II that made for such economical, dispassionate writers. So does the calm detachment with which she presents her characters and their dilemmas. “Cautious words make the story convincing,” Pearlman once told an interviewer. ![]() And in the tear that doesn’t fall, we find not only the father’s tenderness but also his self-denial. “His eyes didn’t sting, really they remembered stinging,” she writes of a father ambushed by memories of his children. What makes Pearlman so good? Like Didion, she’s a master of the spare sentence, of the restrained emotion. And thanks to the National Book Foundation, which recently chose her spectacular short story collection “Binocular Vision” as a finalist for this year’s fiction award, she may yet find the audience that she deserves. Of the two, Joan Didion is by far the better known, but line by line, Edith Pearlman is every bit her equal. ![]() This fall has brought us a rare, beautiful phenomenon: the appreciation of two great women writers in their 70s. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |