The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Tree by Patricia DunckerGraham Fraser
Patricia Duncker. Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees. Ecco, 1998. 197 pp. $22.95.
With this, her first collection of stories, Patricia Duncker returns to the sun-drenched French settings and themes of love and power that characterized her first novel Hallucinating Foucault. Many of these stories are meditations on love—primarily between women—and the emotional and sexual struggles for control and emancipation between lovers. Duncker’s handling of these themes, however, is uneven. Some of her parables of sexual subversion feature characters who are little more than vehicles for a heavy-handed “message” or poles of a sexual conflict. However, when Duncker allows her characters to grow beyond allegorical gender roles, her stories exhibit wit, compassion, and a wicked sense of sociosexual satire.
Several of Duncker’s best stories explore supernatural dimensions, a surprise after the intellectual passions of Hallucinating Foucault. Often the world resonates with sympathy for the protagonists, as if the women in question tap a deeper, natural force of expression and action. But there are ghostly moments in the collection as well, and intimations that some women are much more than they seem: archetypes of female freedom, power, and vengeance who walk unrecognized amongst us. In the concluding and longest story, “The Arrival Matters,” magic is worn lightly in a world of quotidian errands, arthritic joints, and the exhausting pleasures of child minding. The story follows the last days of a kind and cantankerous old woman who is, in fact, one of a group of magicians linked as much by love as by their supernatural secrets. As her life draws to a close, she prepares to pass on her art to the young girl who will be her inheritor, while reuniting for the last time with her lifelong lover. This novella is by far the most engaging piece in the collection, a rumination on life, death, tempestuous, undying love, and the hope we vest in children. Stories such as this confirm Duncker’s talents as a writer. Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees is a varied and captivating collection. [Graham Fraser]