The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Crowning the Queen of Love by Susan Welch
Sally E. Parry

Susan Welch. Crowning the Queen of Love. Coffee House Press, 1997. 230 pp. Paper: $13.95.

The connection between needing to find love and identity in a fragmented, disturbing world provides the thematic core of Susan Welch’s first collection of short stories. These nine pieces show the dislocation caused by a depersonalized society. They range from a story about a young woman leaving her married lover to wed a young man with mental problems to another about a woman who wonders whether her battle with cancer precludes a romantic involvement with her college instructor.
In many of these stories the protagonists are convinced that some new relationship will create a sense of order and change their lives for the better. However, reality never matches the expectation. In one of the strongest stories, “Stalking Angel Dewayne,” a widowed creative writing teacher sees an attractive African-American doctor as an antidote to her joyless existence. She exoticizes him and expects passionate, primitive love; she sends him gifts, waits for him outside the hospital, and virtually forces him to allow her into his life. However he is not the wild lover she wants, but an unhappy middle-aged man with a troubled marriage. Her realization that his affection for her is as dead as the taxidermied animals on the walls of her late husband’s study is the first step in being able to create a new reality for herself.
Other stories show love as a compromise amid larger sociohis-
toric forces. In “Broken Music” a woman escorting her Jewish mother on a tour of the concentration camps feels an attraction for the German tour guide. Her shame is mitigated by finding out how her mother survived the camps. This sense of survival despite serious losses—of spouses, parents, friends—is what makes this collection a fascinating one. [Sally E. Parry]