Distance No Object

Fiction. In DISTANCE NO OBJECT, Gloria Frym turns her ironic, passionate gaze to post-Vietnam Berkeley and San Francisco. Private lives are still swept along by the currents of history, as in the sixties. But the names of the wars have changed . . . the bombs fall on Iraq, and the war on poverty becomes a war against the poor. The stories of DISTANCE NO OBJECT evoke the deep frustrations between generations, friends, neighbors, and races. Yet civility, quotidian justice, a common language, and new love is imagined . . . And Kafka takes his true bride. Gloria Frym's stories strike me as going directly to the heart in a rational way. They hurt by being clear and reasonable -- like William Carlos Williams' poetry, say. But the hurt doesn't mean hurt, exactly; it means affected in a necessary way -- Alice Notley.