The View From Below by Lindsey Crittenden

From the Publisher

Winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Short Fiction, this is the first book by a remarkable writer. These carefully crafted and emotionally honest stories take on, through the smallest details, the largest themes: love, death, loss, exile, and growing up. Crittenden lives & teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nelly Heitman

In the nine short stories in The View from Below, Crittenden vividly captures these feelings of loss and how they are handled by taking her readers into the lives of nine different people...this debut collection is likely to haunt readers' thoughts for a long, long time. -- ForeWord Magazine

Kirkus Reviews

Nine stories by a San Francisco writer, most depicting the sadnesses of domestic life. The characters we meet here, as in so many debut collections, are mostly children who don't know how to begin something or grownups who wish they had never started. The title piece, for example, is a recollection of childhood set in1969, contrasting a little girl's TV viewing of the moon landing with her vaguely untroubled observation of her mother's alcoholism. "The Splendor of Orchids" is a kind of one-step-forward/two-steps-back narrative, in which we watch the inner confusions that overtake Claire, a young garden-catalogue copywriter living by herself in New York, once she decides to end her affair with a married man: "It had been two weeks since they'd broken up, but she still found herself looking for one of Kenneth's stray socks under the sofa, a tie draped over the back of a chair."Another memory play is "Bees for Honey," a grown man's recollection of a disturbed childhood playmate and his awareness of the guilt that haunts him over his role in the accident that precipitated her final breakdown. Intimate glimpses of family tension are found in "What Her Sister Wanted" (two girls and their mother wait uncomfortably for their divorced father's appearance at the younger sister's birthday party) and "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" (after the death of his mother, a son descends into petty crime and hooliganism). "Like This"describes a recovering addict's attempts to stay clean, whereas "Careful" presents the tentative efforts of two graduate students to make their relationship work-though they begin to see the impossibility of it during one camping vacation. Pretty thin gruel: well-craftedand meticulous, but not much of a meal-nor our idea of a feast. .

What People Are Saying

Katherine Vaz
Crittenden's beautiful debut reminds us that lurking right beneath the implacable routines and best-laid plans for all of us are ghosts and stubborn memories, the dead and the longed for. (Katherine Vaz, author of Fado & Other Stories)

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