Like many writers, I feel centered when I write, or it might be better to say, when I don’t write, when I can’t write for whatever reason, I feel, frankly, de-stabilized. It’s dangerous for me not to write.
—
Sigrid Nunez
Sheila Kohler’s One Girl: A Novel in Stories by Patrick McGrath
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
- Frances Kiernan by Lynne Tillman
- Jim Crace by Minna Proctor
- Arto Lindsay by David Krasnow
- Marsha Norman by April Gornik
- Frank Stella by Saul Ostrow
- John Currin by Robert Rosenblum
- Brian Boyd by Thomas Bolt
Interviews
- Al Souza by Suzan Sherman
- Beatrice Caracciolo by George Negroponte
- Joanne Greenbaum by Mary Heilmann
Artists on Artists
- Sleeping Bear Lament by David Means
- Two Poems by Diann Blakely
- Garden of Eden by Elissa Schappell
- The Night Doctor by Javier Marías
- Schwartz and Dill by Matthew Sharpe
- Three Poems by Robert Chute
- Vertigo by W. G. Sebald
- Two Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa
First Proof
- Sheila Kohler’s One Girl: A Novel in Stories by Patrick McGrath
- J. D. Dolan’s Phoenix: A Brother’s Life by Betsy Sussler
- Tim Gardner by Allen Frame
- Wendy Hanson by Suzan Sherman
- Erika Suderburg’s Space, Site, Intervention by Alan Scarritt
- Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less by Mark Magill
- Nilo Cruz’s Two Sisters and a Piano by Rone Shavers
- Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist by Max Winter
- Motherhood and Sexuality by Bette Gordon & Catherine Texier
- Songs in the Key of Fate by Katherine Vaz
- The Melancholy Pseudo-Symphony of 69 Love Songs by Jennifer Bluestein
- Jackie McLean’s Nature Boy by Zoë Anglesey
- Yo La Tengo by Steve Bodow
- Monica Sarsini’s Eruptions by Barry Schwabsky
- Binnie Kirshenbaum’s Pure Poetry by Minna Proctor
- David Trinidad’s Plasticville by Amy Gerstler
Editor's Choice
Photo by Bill Hayward. Courtesy of Helicon Nine and Zoland Books.
Atmosphere is all in the fiction of Sheila Kohler. Born in South Africa but residing in New York, she creates in her novels and short stories a torrid, sultry, heat-hazed climate suggestive of leisured lives in Jo’burg or Cape Town in the halcyon days—for whites, anyway—before Nelson Mandela. There is a ripeness, a languor, a sort of all-encroaching decadence in her writing. It imbues the physical world, which seems to shimmer in the sunlight, arousing a shifting, indefinite feel to things; and it imbues, too the psyches of her characters, frequently schoolgirls discovering the powers and complexities of emergent sexuality.
Her novel The House on R Street is a densely erotic story of a schoolgirl in 1920s South Africa who pleasures strange men in parks and cinemas. It is a gem of a book, and a most perfect expression of Sheila Kohler’s vision. The affluence of this disturbed girl’s homelife is founded on the exploitation of a native workforce: the corruption and evil of the apartheid regime mirrored in various perverse, furtive activities in darkened back bedrooms in the eponymous large shady house.
This fall saw the publication of two new books by Kohler. One Girl, subtitled “A Novel in Stories,” was awarded the Willa Cather Fiction prize by William Gass, who called it “an original, absorbing and carefully detailed novel resembling nothing so much as a scrupulously braided length of entrancing hair.”
It is vintage Kohler. One of the stories, “Cracks,” is set in a posh girls’ boarding school, where a new girl, the lovely, mysterious pale-skinned Fiamma, creates disturbances in the complicated dynamic of this pubescent female community. Out of that story grew a novel of the same name—and a dark piece it is too, though dark like a Balthus. The prose, as ever, is precise, musical, vivid, and the physical setting is evoked with all of Kohler’s masterly dreamy exactitude. Innocence touched with corruption is this writer’s theme, and nobody has done it better since Nabokov.
—Patrick McGrath
One Girl: A Novel in Stories by Sheila Kohler was published by Helicon Nine Editions in 1999. Cracks was published by Zoland Books in 1999.
Related
Even before Stephen died Rosélie was living a certain life of solitude. In fact even when she was small she never had any friends, having been cosseted by her jealous and possessive mother and mixing with the family only because she had to.
Like the gods and mortals in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the characters in Achmat Dangor’s novel Kafka’s Curse transform—from Muslim to Jew, woman to hawk, man to tree; they seek revenge or love in horrible and wonderful ways; they betray or are betrayed.
In Evans’s first interview before the release of her new and unintentionally prescient collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, she discusses humor, power, and replicas of the Titanic.
Originally published in
BOMB 71,
Spring 2000
Featuring interviews with Frank Stella, John Currin, Jim Crace, Frances Kiernan, Brian Boyd, Marsha Norman, and Arto Lindsay.
