The Review of Contemporary Fiction

16 Categories of Desire by Douglas Glover
Amy Havel

Douglas Glover. 16 Categories of Desire. Goose Lane Editions [Canada], 2000. 186 pp. Paper: $18.95.

Douglas Glover’s characters range from the flailingly psychotic to the flatly honest, the desperately sad to the gleefully repressed. All seem original yet familiar too, because Glover puts them in situations that we may have seen before and sets them off in new directions. Example: in “My Romance” a couple is faced with the death of their infant son due to what the doctor calls “failure to thrive.” In certain writers’ hands, the ugly ways that the father chooses to express his grief might make him seem monstrous or pathetic, but Glover provides the character with enough depth for us to see the real fear in his actions. In “A Piece of the True Cross” Glover puts forth what could be a melodramatic set-up (siblings from a dysfunctional family revisit an old site of pain and misfortune) but uses a wonderfully voiced brother character to create a moving story. And although most of the stories utilize a fairly grim irony, “The Left Ladies Club” proves Glover to be talented in humor too. In that story, a woman tells of her estranged writer-husband and the group of writer misfits he calls friends. She, having just given birth to twins, describes new novel projects Duffy takes on as he sinks lower and lower into failure, each with a Duffy-esque protagonist: “Duffy’s new novel . . . was about a boy named Scuffy whose father molests him on a manure pile behind the barn. Stricken by guilt, the father beats his young, pregnant wife to death, only to die himself moments later beneath the hooves of a stampeding herd of Jersey cows. I made Duffy mad by telling him he ought to research that cow thing.” To date, Glover has published three story collections, three novels, and a collection of personal essays and criticism. Sixteen Categories of Desire offers so much in the way of inventiveness and outright skill, I’d recommend not only this latest collection, but a look at his other work as well. [Amy Havel]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction 16 Categories of Desire by Douglas Glover Amy Havel Douglas Glover. 16 Categories of Desire. Goose Lane Editions [Canada], 2000. 186 pp. Paper: $18.95. Douglas Glover’s characters range from the flailingly psychotic to the flatly honest, the desperately sad to the gleefully repressed. All seem original yet familiar too, because Glover puts them in situations that we may have seen before and sets them off in new directions. Example: in “My Romance” a couple is faced with the death of their infant son due to what the doctor calls “failure to thrive.” In certain writers’ hands, the ugly ways that the father chooses to express his grief might make him seem monstrous or pathetic, but Glover provides the character with enough depth for us to see the real fear in his actions. In “A Piece of the True Cross” Glover puts forth what could be a melodramatic set-up (siblings from a dysfunctional family revisit an old site of pain and misfortune) but uses a wonderfully voiced brother character to create a moving story. And although most of the stories utilize a fairly grim irony, “The Left Ladies Club” proves Glover to be talented in humor too. In that story, a woman tells of her estranged writer-husband and the group of writer misfits he calls friends. She, having just given birth to twins, describes new novel projects Duffy takes on as he sinks lower and lower into failure, each with a Duffy-esque protagonist: “Duffy’s new novel . . . was about a boy named Scuffy whose father molests him on a manure pile behind the barn. Stricken by guilt, the father beats his young, pregnant wife to death, only to die himself moments later beneath the hooves of a stampeding herd of Jersey cows. I made Duffy mad by telling him he ought to research that cow thing.” To date, Glover has published three story collections, three novels, and a collection of personal essays and criticism. Sixteen Categories of Desire offers so much in the way of inventiveness and outright skill, I’d recommend not only this latest collection, but a look at his other work as well. [Amy Havel]

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