The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Necessary Fictions by Barbara Croft
Nicole Lamy

Barbara Croft. Necessary Fictions. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. 224 pp. $22.50.

In the visually acute and psychologically perceptive stories collected in Necessary Fictions, Barbara Croft fixes her characters at the junctures where loss and art intersect. These characters, many of them artists and writers whose careers have stalled, turn their techniques to their personal lives. The situations that result seem like setups for elaborate jokes about the creative proclivities of writers and artists, although the punch line always seems tragic rather than funny: the writer protagonist in “The Woman in the Headlights,” who can’t shake his depression two years after a car accident in which he struck and killed a pedestrian, uses his skills for invention to create a new life for himself; the artist in “Three Weeks in Italy and France,” who, though she hasn’t been painting, tackles her garden with a sharp eye toward color and form. Constructed with an eye toward the parallels between art and life, Croft’s stories are filled with carefully wrought images which are extensions of her themes. Though clearly the work of a writer assured and knowledgeable in her craft, the deliberately artistic images often seem self-conscious and draw attention away from the situations and characters, which Croft has so compellingly created.
In the second section of her book, a novella and three interconnected short stories which map the life of the Gerhardt family, Croft’s gifts are on full display. The occasion of the sale of her childhood home provides Maggie Gerhardt, the family’s self-appointed historian, with the opportunity to revisit emblematic family moments—their search for the perfect, American-Dream house, the truth behind her father’s death, her brother’s actions in Vietnam. As Maggie puzzles through her family’s history, the images and family stories repeat, and the narrative flashes forward and back until, remarkably, the snaking threads of the stories combine to produce a narrative akin to the fabric of memory. In reckoning the hopes of the Gerhardts’ past with the disappointment that has bloomed for them in the present, Croft demonstrates the force and veracity behind Necessary Fictions; recounting stories is as vital to the present as it is to retaining the past. [Nicole Lamy]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Necessary Fictions by Barbara Croft Nicole Lamy Barbara Croft. Necessary Fictions. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. 224 pp. $22.50. In the visually acute and psychologically perceptive stories collected in Necessary Fictions, Barbara Croft fixes her characters at the junctures where loss and art intersect. These characters, many of them artists and writers whose careers have stalled, turn their techniques to their personal lives. The situations that result seem like setups for elaborate jokes about the creative proclivities of writers and artists, although the punch line always seems tragic rather than funny: the writer protagonist in “The Woman in the Headlights,” who can’t shake his depression two years after a car accident in which he struck and killed a pedestrian, uses his skills for invention to create a new life for himself; the artist in “Three Weeks in Italy and France,” who, though she hasn’t been painting, tackles her garden with a sharp eye toward color and form. Constructed with an eye toward the parallels between art and life, Croft’s stories are filled with carefully wrought images which are extensions of her themes. Though clearly the work of a writer assured and knowledgeable in her craft, the deliberately artistic images often seem self-conscious and draw attention away from the situations and characters, which Croft has so compellingly created. In the second section of her book, a novella and three interconnected short stories which map the life of the Gerhardt family, Croft’s gifts are on full display. The occasion of the sale of her childhood home provides Maggie Gerhardt, the family’s self-appointed historian, with the opportunity to revisit emblematic family moments—their search for the perfect, American-Dream house, the truth behind her father’s death, her brother’s actions in Vietnam. As Maggie puzzles through her family’s history, the images and family stories repeat, and the narrative flashes forward and back until, remarkably, the snaking threads of the stories combine to produce a narrative akin to the fabric of memory. In reckoning the hopes of the Gerhardts’ past with the disappointment that has bloomed for them in the present, Croft demonstrates the force and veracity behind Necessary Fictions; recounting stories is as vital to the present as it is to retaining the past. [Nicole Lamy]

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