Mending

Starred review from August 15, 2011
Spanning 50 years, this omnibus of Bingham’s tight, sparkling short fiction includes stories from her earliest collection, The Touching Hand (1967), to her latest, Red Car (2008). The title story that opens the collection demonstrates the attention to detail and skillfully rendered emotional tension that characterize Bingham’s work. “My trade is doctors,” the story’s anxious young heroine declares as she visits one after the other. Believing herself deficient in feeling, she becomes smitten with her tired, green-eyed psychiatrist, “who seemed to have spent himself warming people up.” Though he won’t have her as a lover, she recognizes that his therapeutic acceptance of her scabby need is a kind of love. In “Found,” set five years after the end of WWII, the privileged daughter of the U.S. ambassador to France comes to understand society’s miseries while living in a Paris full of scarred, hostile survivors. In the disquieting “Anywhere You Send Me,” the values of a wealthy, older woman clash with the unimaginable destitution of the motley band of Haitian refugees that she shelters on her Southern farm. Bingham’s work, including favorites such as “The Wedding” and “Sweet Peas,” remains sharp and deliciously unsettling, ripe for discovery by a new generation of readers.

August 1, 2011

This collection of new and selected stories spans work from 1967 to the present by an important writer who is too little known. These stories are remarkable for their economy of language and for the author's ability, within a small frame, to allow the undefined but intense emotion of a central character (male or female, young or old) to sharpen in focus to the point at which both reader and character share the surprise of insight. In "August Ninth at Natural Bridge," from Bingham's 1972 collection, The Way It Is Now, a family's traditional birthday outing becomes the setting for a girl's seemingly typical teenage surliness to open out gradually into a terrifying understanding of sexual gamesmanship. These stories end with a stunning metaphoric resonance. In the more recent "Apricots," for instance, a 63-year-old teacher allows herself to be seduced by a student helping her can apricots. Toward the end of the story, Bingham moves from action to recollection with the following sentence: "Later, Caroline remembered the flesh of the apricots, their slight graininess, the moisture that was not dripping like the sweetness of peaches but absorbed, contained." VERDICT Like the fruit in "Apricots," the stories in this rich collection are characterized by a ripeness of language and the graininess of surprising truths.--Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2011
This abundant collection of Bingham's new and selected stories spans a rich 50-year career, from The Touching Hand (1967) to the present. New tales include the stirring title story, in which a young woman propels herself from doctor to doctor, searching for an answer to troubles largely projected by her mother and aunt. Once she is in the care of a sympathetic psychiatrist, she mercifully discovers a means by which to thrive. In Selling the Farm, adult sisters Shirley and Miriam visit their childhood farm, recently sold by Miriam to make way for a housing development. As the two reflect on the past and the different paths of their livesMiriam is a singer in New York City; Shirley is a housewiferegrets and resentments are duly exposed. In Found, a seemingly routine trip to the dentist becomes one adolescent's awakening during the unease of postWWII France. Stories from Bingham's earlier works, notably August Ninth at Natural Bridge and Sagesse, effortlessly capture the delicacies of emotion as well as the esoteric nature of perception and reality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)