Women in Their Beds

Women in Their Beds gathers thirty five stories from four decades of Gina Berriault's work: twenty five drawn from her earlier collections and ten that had appeared only in magazines. Most are set in and around San Francisco, most are short, and almost all concern people on the margins, a librarian, a drifter, a social worker, an old man, a child, caught at the moment their view of themselves gives way. Berriault does not write plots so much as pressures.

The best known piece is The Stone Boy, written in 1957 and first collected in 1965. Nine year old Arnold, climbing through a fence on the way to pick peas, accidentally shoots and kills his older brother Eugie. He goes on picking peas for an hour before he walks home to tell his parents, and the story is about what his family and the neighbors make of that silence. That night he goes to his mother's door to confess his horror and is turned away, and in the morning he leaves the house, frightened by his own words. Berriault wrote the screenplay for the 1984 film, which starred Robert Duvall and Glenn Close. The title story follows a hospital social worker and would be actress who discovers more about human beings in a women's ward than she wanted to know. In Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am? an aging librarian, Alberto Perera, is befriended by a young drifter who wants to understand life through Spanish poetry. In The Infinite Passion of Expectation a psychologist of seventy nine courts a practical young waitress, who withdraws after meeting his former wife. The Search for J. Kruper sends a vain novelist after an equally famous recluse, and A Dream of Fair Women turns on a marriage and an infidelity.

Publishers Weekly praised her great psychological acuity and a compassion that comes always from observation, never from sentimentality. Kirkus admitted that the stories are sometimes inelegantly fashioned or unaccountably abrasive, and then said they dig deeply inside her troubled characters and stay with you long after. The book is around 350 pages, easy to read a story at a time, and it suits admirers of Alice Munro and William Trevor who have not yet met her.