| The Done For Man and Other Stories portrays a world formed by its characters' desires. Desiring the comforts of what they lack---fathers, mothers, religion, economic stability, social justice, love---characters in these stories turn inward in order to balance their lives. In the title story, Lucille Taylor longs for her father, an imposing yet consistently absent figure. To cope with his departure, she rehashes a memory of a dead man's mysterious appearance in her childhood fort; by story's end the two men have merged in their stubborn nonexistence. Lucille's solution, in which she imagines her own ending for the "dead man," arises from her desire for her father's presence. In "A Violin in Washington Square," the plot movement is dictated by Irene Gasperi's desperate straining to find external signs. The reader's recognition of the ironic ending provides the only true epiphany: we see that which we desire. In other works, characters seek fulfillment by looking to figures, language, and lessons from their pasts. They also use systems or abstract forms such as counting, making lists, breaking down words into syllables, or reciting rhymes. Sometime these quiet mechanisms buy time, as in "Half Life," where Amber, missing her daughter during a twenty-one month stint in the county jail, comes to see her cellmate in a new light. Sometimes systems lull a character into reverie, as in "Starry Vault," or provide a path out of panic, as in "Perdurability." In the final piece, "The Flesh Ring," eight narrators circle around themes of body and mind, from the opening narrator's need for acceptance and his obsession with Hitler's mistress to the blind boy who sees Holocaust figures in his dreams. Resolution, if such is to be found, comes when characters accept responsibility---both personally and for a larger human community---for how desire creates the world. |
