Reviews
Flesh
and Bone
by Cydney Chadwick
Flesh and Bone is saturated with mysteries. These stories are sexy, religious, and relentlessly intelligent, as impervious to denial as a finger cut that refuses to heal.
--Barry Gifford
A girl sits in a bookstore reading Arthur Cravan's Oeuvres. A man comes along and starts discussing Cravan with her. Next thing you know they are living together--unhappily. And reliving the lives of Cravan and Mina Loy in curious ways. This is the sort of material Cydney Chadwick uses in her brilliant new short story collection. In story after story, the most everyday of occurrences, related with scrupulous objectivity, yield cruel, indeed devastating insights about the human condition. To call a short story writer Chekhovian has become a cliche, but Chadwick really IS Chekhovian in her attention to detail, her spareness, her use of every cat's hair and beer bottle for special effect. I think she is one of the two or three best short fiction writers we have in the U.S. today.
--Marjorie Perloff
Flesh and Bone is an original and chillingly powerful collection of stories. Cydney Chadwick observes her all-too-recognizable characters, driven along their ways through a world they never chose, with a clarity so intense as to become a devastating and compelling radiance.
--Harry Mathews
A short-story collection that opens with a tale of a man's relationship with his contact lenses is not for everyone. Yet Penngrove author Cydney Chadwick has a gift for using minutiae of everyday life to weave compelling accounts of postmodern alienation in the lives of characters such as a nameless apartment dweller who comes to rely on a neighbor's marijuna habit. These accounts also offer a painful humor:"When he ventures down to his mailbox he is still a famous poet, but while out on the street amidst others he is not quite as renowned. The further he gets from his apartment he less well-known he is.
--The Northern California Bohemian
"...the exquisite and sometimes excruciating
physical detail ground each character in an unique circumstance...Chadwick
uses Brechtian detachment to offer critiques of art culture, sex culture,
every culture.
Chadwick's insight into the human condition is devastating, yet there's
something pleasing about witnessing her split open the illusion of wholeness
to reveal the bits and pieces that make up the everyday. Flesh and
Bone is a pinata of bitter candy, but you'll be glad you were around
to see it burst."
--Rain Taxi
"...Chadwick's fine collection of stories, Flesh and Bone, many of which take place in the wine country north of San Francisco. One would assume a tart, sanguine claret to flavor the lines in Chadwick's lucid narratives...They are direct and honest and written with a highly restrained, minimalist limpidity. "The artisans of minimalism and of the short story in general share the creative gift of knowing when to amplify, when to fade, and when to modulate," observes Cynthia Hallet, "theirs is the ability to achieve a credible texture of consciousness without apparent strain." Hallet goes on to say that a minimalist story relies on dialogue and perfected surface details rather than introspective comments by the narrator or characters to tell a story, and though she is speaking specifically of short story writers such as Chekhov and Hemingway, these qualities befit Chadwick's vivid compressions."
"...Chadwick's collection says it all: flesh and bone. A text whose complications are evoked in the reader's mind by significant details rather than textural shading, what Diane Stevenson calls "the very clean machine of signifer devoid of resonances." "Surface is reality. Reality is code."
"...One of my personal favorites is "Confessions of a Noun." This little tale, which uses the second person to great effect, is about the wonderful--one could easily say voluptuous--space of solitude in which the great mysteries of writing take place. It occurs on a dark gray day of heavy rain. One can smell the air charged with nitrogen and negative ions. The last long sentence, which imitates in its hurried rhythm the footsteps the author hears coming from outside, ends on a note of felicitous fecundity: ". . . this you with two hands and a pen in a rented room in the rain."
--John Olson, First Intensity
"...most figures who inhabit Chadwick's stories are nameless, yet they possess an uncanny familiarity in their contradictions, quirks and persistence in trying to figure things out. They have a strange allure, too, which takes one into some odd territories...a series of stories well worth reading and contemplating."
--Ray Ragosta, Sugarmule
"...As in the world of Samuel Beckett, these characters don't have any options other than the ones they continually repeat: sexual liasons with unattractive partners, work in sustaining but unfullfilling jobs, the daily routine of coffee shops, bicycle rides, and phone calls...Chadwick's style is perfectly honed to her material; her sentences are crisp, clean and direct. Stories are between one and four pages long, on average, and employ a welcome get-to-the point craft... [they are] infused with a subtle but sharp humor... She is actively engaged in continuous evaluation of language, both as descriptive and as the primordial material that inhabits consciousness..."
--American Book Review
"Cydney Chadwick creates carefully wrought yet relentles examinations into the lives of women as they engage in ongoing dynamics with the voices of the people around them, their own inner voices, compulsions, and the cultural context that determines the shape and scope of their daily routines. In doing so, Chadwick challenges many assumptions about women's writing....it is important to use writings such as Chadwick's to develop a postfeminist mindset that refuses to rely on simplistic and often unconscious catagorizations based on crude generalizations (male/female.) The stories in Flesh and Bone deal with lives, circumstances and consciousness--with gender as a perplexing monkey wrench in the quest for an understanding of self."
--World Literature Today