Still Lives

Gary Catalano is perhaps better known for his poetry and art-criticism rather than as a writer of short fiction. The Woman Who Lives Here, a book which contains five short stories and sixteen ‘Sketches’, will do little to alter this. For though the writing is stylistically unexceptionable, Catalano's material is perilously thin, lacking in dramatic situation, intellectual vigour and point. Of the five stories which comprise the opening section of the book, four deal with those ubiquitous themes of ‘modernism’: alienation and absence. Given the by now long and rich literary heritage which concerns itself with these concepts it is hardly surprising to find that Catalano's various formal devices rely heavily on earlier models. Techniques of discontinuity, fragmentary notes and deliberate concealments are variously used in these stories giving them an air of unresolved mystery and sometimes menace. But unlike the pioneers in such forms Catalano seems to be experimenting for experimentation's sake; no pressure of feeling informs the writing, leaving the reader with a sense of the writer's ennui, as well as that of his characters.