Who Do You Love?

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

When J.D. Salinger began chatting up the reader in the opening paragraph
of The Catcher in the Rye, he spawned a generation of writers molded in
his style. One of his more imaginative progeny is Leon Rooke, who is,
perhaps, best known for Shakespeare’s Dog but has also published
several collections of short stories. The 26 stories in this collection
focus on such everyday dramas as the breakdown of a marriage and a young
boy’s first experience of sex. Most of the stories are told from the
perspective of one of the main characters, but thoughts and images
triggered by the storyteller’s imagination tend to result in a
complex, often enlightening, and sometimes humorous blend of the factual
and fanciful in which the sequences have the disturbing logic of a
dream. After feasting without pause on more than half the book, I began
to find the verbal pyrotechnics a bit constipating, and my advice to the
reader would be to spread consumption over several sittings.