"The Curse of the Appropriate Man"

At a recent library sale, I spotted a short story collection titled "The Curse of the Appropriate Man" (Harcourt, 2004), by Lynn Freed. I couldn't resist buying it, partly because I had read and liked other books by Freed, a South African author who lives here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and partly because the title was so intriguing. Some of the stories take place in South Africa and some in the United States, some are about poor black servants and some about sophisticated but often restless and unhappy whites in both South Africa and the U.S. Issues of race, class, and gender underlie many of the stories. The women characters in particular seem to have trouble settling into their lives; they are dissatisfied seekers and yet seem resigned to their inability to find or create better lives. The title story explores a topic that many women are very familiar with: the attraction women often feel to the "bad boys," the outlaws, the men who may not treat them well or offer stable lives, but who provide excitement and a feeling of being fully alive. Women know these men aren't good for them, but can't resist them either, and they may find more "appropriate" men dull. Freed is an excellent writer, the author of several novels, perhaps most notably "Home Ground" (Mariner, 1987), which I read and was impressed by many years ago. More recently, I very much liked her book of autobiographical/literary essays (a genre I am quite partial to, as readers of this blog have probably noticed), "Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home: Life on the Page" (Harcourt, 2005), which I posted about on 2/10/10.