cover image Sexual Life of Savages and Other Stories

Sexual Life of Savages and Other Stories

Stokes Howell. St. Martin's Press, $20.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-312-14414-2

Two very different landscapes, rural Missouri and urban New York City, inform 21 tales told by two searingly realistic, male first-person voices that expose a hard, unforgiving core at the center of relationships and sexual experiences. In the rural setting, the young narrator embarks on low-life adventures like those recalled in ""Baker,"" in which he gets drunk on whiskey, hangs out with a 62-year-old man who knows every whore in town and ends up meeting two of them. What is poignant is how, as the narrator explains his dubious encounters, he is at once naive and possessed of enough self-awareness to convey his sense of exhilaration-and of dissociation and loss. This kind of heightened emotional paradox is even more pronounced in those stories set in New York City. The speaker of ""In the Bathroom at Joey's Restaurant"" describes his longtime, tumultuous relationship with Veronica-who breaks up with him constantly, only to want him back-as she is, once again, trying to reunite with him. Howell's stripped-bare, kinetic voice captures both the speaker's love for Veronica and his desire to get away from the psychodrama that being with her entails. A sly, bittersweet humor runs as an undercurrent throughout, as in the surreal ""Willie and Jackie,"" an ill-fated love story about a wildebeest and a jellyfish. Overall, Howell's bracing prose and honesty about the dark side of love renders this collection sad, funny and devastatingly articulate. (June)