Thirteen: Stories

A doctor sets up a suicide parlor where people ``could go to die in peace, painlessly . . . 24 hours a day, 7 days a week''; a 19th century housewife kills herself after she has failed to store sufficient provisions for a protracted winter, and, in a note, exhorts her family to eat her corpse. A recently divorced woman entertains her former spouse's nephew in the nude--unwittingly; another woman ruminates on a relationship she enjoyed at age 32 with a 17-year-old; a third confesses, ``They've arrested me for eating the baby.'' Similarly morbid or perverse concerns preoccupy the other protagonists in these short stories. Molinaro ( Positions with White Roses ) observes her characters with unusual acuity. Her experimental style, however, encompasses distracting, eventually grating mannerisms, such as idiosyncratic punctuation and frequent amputation of subjects from sentences: ``He makes a cult of cats. & quotes a famous painter whose name he can't remember. Who said that . . . '' (May)