Christey Foster's Reviews > Lust and Other Stories

** spoiler alert ** “She’d seen a new world, one she didn’t know anything about. She was drawn to it” (60). This is a personal feeling that Susan Minot’s Lust and Other Stories brings to me. The book serves as a passport or a golden ticket.
This short story book was published in 1989 by Houghton Mifflin. Throughout Lust and Other Stories, Minot creates an assortment of love, lust, and sexual situations that explores the difficulties of romantic relationships or lack thereof.
Throughout these stories, the main highlight is the inequality of men and women in relationships. The men through the text, for the most part, are those who scarcely undergo any misery at all. Furthermore, they tend to be unfeeling and uncommitted. On the other hand, her women tend to be those who are affected by previous or current experiences in their love and/or sexual lives that have or are currently deteriorating. They are anguished and empty after their unsatisfying relationship and are now afflicted with emotional baggage and pain. The stories juxtapose the differences of the roles of these men and women in romantic relationships.
An example of these relationships is in “The Man Who Would Not Go Away.” The unnamed narrator who thinks often of a reporter she previously had a relationship with and has to distracts herself in day to day life seeing films to pass time. While she longs, the man after being in the relationship for only a short time when he was initially “persistent,” he grow “distracted” and “drifted away” moving along effortlessly (141).
While reading through these stories, it feels quite natural to be unattached to the main character, usually a woman, as this emphasizes the women the protagonists’ isolation and emptiness that they feel after their disconcerting experiences in their relationships.
The stories are told in a variety of point of views ranging from first person to third person and limited to omniscient. These points of views effectively add depth and variety to the stories. While the first person narration effectively conveys the protagonist’s interior feelings and thoughts. The stories with third person omniscient point of views usually focus on one character.
Minot’s style is like that of a minimalist, giving physically only the surface of the story with the rest being implied. Her writing is straightforward using simple diction and sentence structure. Minot’s strength, in my opinion, lies with her style. Her simple, honest approach is clear-cut and refreshing. The fact that she can write about the same thing repeatedly while presenting a new take on it every time is phenomenal and inspiring.
As a writer, Susan Minot is someone for me to look up to. I am more of a poetry person myself but I do enjoy writing a short story now and then and her simplistic approach is something that I can connect with but her work is a prime example of the way to do it right, something I feel I struggle with. Her ability to disconnect a reader while keeping them engaged is also unparalleled and, with any luck, this is something that will probably not only seep into my short stories but probably my poetry as well.