Books in Brief

The Quick by Agnes Rossi,

Flamingo pounds 4.99. Ten short stories by a young American much concerned with death and its effect on the living. Most have small-town settings and are loosely connected through a central figure whose rites of passage are familiar to us from other contemporary American fiction - a woman who is the first in her family to go to college, who fights with her parents, behaves unpredictably, is unlucky in love, falls apart and then gets herself back together. As if to put the banal processes of living into perspective, there are a number of deaths: in the long title story we see the low-key aftermath of the dramatic death from a heart attack of the handsome husband of an office colleague. However neatly plotted Rossi's stories are, however gritty her descriptions of hospital wards and funerals, we are left with a not-unpleasant impression that her view of life is of a long-running soap-opera of more than usual purposelessness.