The characters are involving, the observation bracing, and the action sexy and hilarious, so we do not mind that this story overflows its form, and the older narrator becomes a token presence at the very end – though we may long to read the novel to which all this seems to belong. The next piece, “Sentimental Education”, also essays a classic short story shape, the sort where the voice of an older narrator, in this case another stressed mother, and the deeds of her younger self, a driven Cambridge student, twist together and gleam like the surfaces of a Möbius strip. It takes us inside the busy, anxious mind of a single mother trying to enjoy her holiday, and it turns on images of chicken: barbecued and gobbled, bones buried in the sand, and finally, uniting her meditation on migrations and gender, chicks being sexed in a factory where all the males are “swept into huge grinding vats where they are minced alive”. “The Dialectic” is set, like “Lady with Lapdog”, in a European seaside resort. In the opening story of this volume, though, Smith duly pours her naturally various energies into a narrow Chekhovian frame.
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