Paperback (January 11, 2001)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.ca Evelyn
Lau's first short fiction collection, Fresh Girls, lingers in
spaces "dusty with red light so everyone looks good, even sometimes a
man." Her characters, whether professional or amateur, are all in the
shadowy business of sex, but the economic and social stigmas that attach
to their marginal lives are dwarfed by their shared profound inner
disappointment. Lau's deft clinical inspection of the dynamics of power,
sex, and money takes caustic snapshots of lives lived in stasis or, worse,
caught in a downward spiral. In the title story, Monica, the queen bee of the massage parlour, is
threatened by the constant influx of supple young women: "New girls, they
come; new girls all the time. How am I supposed to make a living? Tell
me!" In "Marriage," a nameless young woman falls heavily for an older
doctor.
Under his deluge of compensatory gifts and outright cash, she
gasps, "I have no similar method of striking such bargains with my
conscience." Plain Jane, in "The Apartments," dares to dream that "Perhaps
tonight will be the night he sinks to his knees" and tells her that he
loves her, "that he can't be a client anymore."
Not a chance. On the
sobering cab ride home, "between the waves of nausea it occurs to her that
certain things, things that once seemed so possible, are becoming less and
less likely with each passing night."
Lau's writing is clear and relentlessly nuanced, neither jaded nor
sanctimonious.
A detour toward personal destruction spawned her
best-selling 1989 memoir, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. Three
years later, her first book of poetry, Oedipal Dreams, made Lau the
youngest-ever Governor General's Award nominee, and she has continued to
fashion poignant books of poetry, short story collections, and novels from
the shards of her shattered past.
