Choose Me
by Evelyn Lau
Doubleday Canada, 1999.
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Evelyn Lau dedicated her last book, the novel Other Women,
to John Updike with whom she admitted in reviews to being "half in
love with." The desire was at least partly stylistic. Lau has always
written like an angel.
In her new short story collection, Choose Me,
however, Lau falls into an all too common blunder: beautiful prose expressing
less than interesting ideas. It's a fault that befalls many writers known
as much for their rhetorical skill as for the substance of their writing
(Updike is one).
Lau's writing career began with a bang with the release
of Runaway, her diary from her days as a teenaged prostitute, which
was quickly followed by the release of three volumes of poetry ranging
from the gritty to the sharply polished.
Her early writing, including
the excellent Fresh Girls, her first short story collection, was
hotwired by its lack of sentimentality and its almost documentary vision.
In her later work, Lau has attempted to sketch on a larger sociological
canvas, following mentors like Updike, John Cheever, even F. Scott Fitzgerald,
as some critics have noted.
In Runaway Lau was writing from the
inside out; now she's on the outside looking in. Readers will have to
decide for themselves which is more interesting: street kids chasing drugs
or the upper-middle class rummaging through empty, meaningless affairs.
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