When Amy Bloom writes, she tends to hear things before she can see them. For example, the title of her second collection of stories, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, was something an old boyfriend had said to her, so sweet and well phrased she suspects it prolonged the doomed relationship. In “Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages” a woman observes that her husband and his friend “talk like they’ve just come from a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff”. They are white-collar workers, watching TV news, in the US equivalent of Surrey. “It’s either a first sentence,” says Bloom, “or it’s a little conversation between two people, and then suddenly I know who’s saying it. I hear the speaker and then I see the character and then I see the story.”
The men in the living room with their important opinions open her third collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, which sounds like a Judy Blume novel but is a decisively grown-up compilation of two quartets and four stand-alone pieces. It is a strange assortment, held together by Bloom’s unerring tone: sharp, dark, flatly hilarious, full of crises revisited which, with a chiropractic snap, are put into sudden perspective by those who have suffered them. There are the small transgressions – a teenager who paints a picture of the crucifixion on her trouser leg (“I’m not mocking Jesus,” I told my mother. “I’m just representing him, on my jeans”) – and the large ones: a woman who has slept with her own stepson, an old bully with Alzheimer’s who throws things at his family. All are recounted with restraint and brevity. A man called William says to his wife, “darling, you are as clear and bright as vinegar but not everyone wants their pipes cleaned”. It’s a sentiment that might apply to the author, who, on a freezing day in Connecticut, poses gamely in a blizzard and issues a friendly warning to the photographer: that in photos she tends to go one of two ways, OK or George Foreman.
How my heart sings 