Honey

by Elizabeth Tallent

The men and women in Elizabeth Tallent's stories think a great deal about love. They argue about it at the dinner table. They cling to it with talismans. They flirt with strangers or moon impossibly over aunts and cousins.

In Honey , Elizabeth Tallent animates her characters' predicaments and charts the wild arcs of their longings with breathtaking grace and profound emotional truth.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 1993

About the author

Elizabeth Tallent's short stories have been published in literary magazines and journals such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The Threepenny Review, and North American Review, and her stories have been reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize collections.

She has taught literature and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of California, Davis. She has been a faculty member at Stanford University since 1994.

Reviews

[Gabriel Valjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Tallent is a writer of relationships with an anthropologist’s dispassionate eye for details. I browsed online and discovered that she had an interest in archaeology before she went into academia; and it shows in her writing. Anthropology is, I think, more accurate because all throughout these nine stories the reader is shown mundane items of daily use, the props that her characters see as an extension of their identities and beliefs: a high-heeled shoe, tortoiseshell glasses, a book, or a wedding ring gone down the drain.

Tallent captures the in-between time of relationships; the insecurities that lovers negotiate in and out of their time together, like private thoughts while caring for children or driving a car. Each of her stories is physical, almost voyeuristic; bodies are in motion and observed, but not judged. Places are visited in order to gather intelligence, understand the beloved. There are divorces, separations, losses and reconciliations. Touch and other gestures are interpreted and redefined. Fairy tales about romance are either imploded or reignited. Car trips, train rides, plane trips are meditations on departure and arrivals. The last story edges into the territory of paranoia, stalking, and domestic abuse.

I should mention that Tallent loves New Mexico. I can’t help but think that her choice of the desert landscape fits her metaphor for love – hot and sometimes suffocating in the day, smoldering or cold at night.

Tallent uses descriptive language and there are times when it feels painted on in thick layers, but she does have a deft turn of phrase, and a poet's sensibility. I do think that she deserves a better literary reputation. I’ve pulled out some of my favorites from each story.

“In the refrigerator, nothing much – milk, bread, juice, the usual, and a half-empty bottle of Beaujolais with the cork floating in the wine. She never handled corkscrews well. Peanut butter. Garlic, fat cloves in mauve-white paper. He takes the garlic out – garlic doesn’t belong in the refrigerator -- but, holding the crisp little weight, he doesn’t know what to do with it. If he leaves it out, she’s going to know somebody was here. He has to put it back. He does.” –Prowler

“He is so far from the reality of body, of breath, that she can hate him as from a great distance.” –Black Dress

“Her touch was utterly familiar, light, practical, dismissive, quick. It made him nervous. Yet they can’t make each other nervous; it’s a possibility that vanished from their marriage long ago.” –Ciudad Juarez

“In a chipped sink, before a postcard of mirror, she washed in water so icy it rang in the bones of her hands.” –Earth to Molly

“Their lovemaking was an act so baldly needy and spontaneous, so short, unadorned, and potentially devastating, that…” –Honey

“She ran past the laundry on the line, and I could feel my father get angry because she had left all his innocent shirts hanging, their arms helplessly flung wide in darkness in repeated silent pleading.” - Get It Back For Me

“She will have to learn girlfriend all over, the light provocativeness, the essential friendliness. This idea makes her feel tired and sad and heavy-handed.” –Kid Gentle

“She has quotes in her voice, too, but he likes her for them.” –The Minute I Saw You

“It gets James out of bed in the barely-there light: he’s going to carry a gun.” –James Was There

[Cheryl]

Got about 1/3, skipped to the title story, stopped. Boring. People I don't care about, that I get the impression Tallent doesn't care about... they're stand-ins for the emotions they're supposedly feeling, the decisions they're supposedly making. They're icons. I agree with other reviewers that some of the writing is beautiful, but that's not enough to carry me through so much depressing minutiae, so many blah people committing petty acts of selfish disregard.

[Emily Turner-hagman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like this book but I also didn't hate it either. I have so many mixed feelings about this book. I liked the beautiful writing but what Tallent wrote and how she organized everything just didn't make sense to me. I think the best way I could describe this is that Tallent had a lot of good story ideas and just slapped them together. I was bored and confused a lot of the time. I found myself really just skimming the book without really comprehending anything. This book had some potential but it fell flat for me. maybe some time later down the line I'll give this book another go but it was just a weird reading experience for me.

[Riley Moffatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was like. Okay. I guess. It took me eons to finish because I was bored. The writing is lovely and sometimes I was interested but I was mostly super not into it at all. It’s hard already to hold attention with short stories, as there’s nothing to be invested in, and this one really sucked at it. I’m not sure I’d recommend. It wasn’t bad but it also wasn’t really good.

[Shelley Wiley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time getting through this book. Just didn’t have a spark.

[Sandra Novack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is probably going to speak more to women, but what I admire about Tallent is her ability to nail an ending and just have everything come together in the last moments. She's a good one to have around if, as a writer, you are always writing past the end or stopping before it, or (as in my frequent case) just not quite getting it "right."

[Catarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. It was hard for me to finish. I did not feel connected to the characters. There is one set of stories with the same characters and I think it was interesting to see the perspective of different characters. But overall, Honey fell flat for me.

[Nyambura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the voice, the stories, how they were interconnected.