James Mason and the walk-in closet

the long version

In this collection of short fiction - two novellas and eleven short stories - June Akers Seese writes of the Sylvia Plath generation: older women who, although alienated from conventional roles, remain unliberated by the feminist movement, and are thereby stranded in silent anguish between two worlds, belonging to neither. Her characters in this collection of urban tales include a teacher who sleeps with a rock star on her lunch break, a defrocked priest, a saxophone player who finds a Brillo pad in his scrambled eggs, a psychiatrist whose glasses fall off his nose, and a legal secretary still in love with her estranged homosexual husband. Though haunted by the past, these characters experience moments when the complexities of life are distilled into something immediate and illuminating. The style is tough but lyrical, wry but compassionate. The settings are invariably urban - Chicago, Detroit, Georgetown, Atlanta, Dublin - and she fills these cities with modern men and women we recognize and pity. Her hard themes of loss, hunger, and rage break finally into a rebellious acceptance that is her work's hallmark: its everyday heroism.