title: Excitable Women Damaged Men
author: Robert Boyers
description: The judgment Boyers (<i>Salmagundi</i> editor-in-chief) passes on his characters in the title of his first collection carries throughout the nine distanced, detached stories about the personal dilemmas of a series of troubled New Yorkers. In "An Excitable Woman," a grown son details the "principled unloveliness" of his elderly mother, who tests her family's love and loyalty with temper tantrums. Boyers offers a more elegiacand condescendingtake on female bitterness in "The French Lesson," about a young woman who leaves New York for Paris in the 1970s, but after a "twenty-year-long French experiment" that produces two children and an ex-husband, she is "as disappointed in the one place as in the other." In "Tribunal," Steve, a promiscuous young money manager, is outmaneuvered by Shula, a tough, divorced Israeli woman. Boyers cleverly captures how not only Shula's games but the cultural divide (Steve suffers an inferiority complex as one of the "uncircumcised") tantalize the young man. A young editor weathers the marital "thrust and parry and cut and slash and tear" of poet Robert Lowell and his wife, Caroline, in the contrived story "The Visit." Boyers writes with considerable authority, but his consistent lack of affection for his characters cools the collection. <i>(Oct.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  “You are a woman of great courage to face those cutthroats alone.”
  
  His fingers closed around hers as if she were a lifeline. Her late husband’s
  hands had always been smooth and soft, the hands of a gentleman, so unlike
  this man’s calluses which bespoke hard work. She marveled at the strength in
  those hands, not to mention the tingles that traveled up her arm.
  
  A flush crept over her face and she struggled to retain her composure. “I saw
  a cruel act and felt compelled to intervene. I could do nothing less.”
  
  His eyes darted over her face and he said in a stronger voice, “Those men
  might have turned on you.”
  
  “I’m an excellent shot.”
  
  “And did you not consider that you may have been in danger from me?”
  
  She suspected many women found him a very great danger, but not for the reason
  he spoke.
  
  Swallowing against a dry mouth, she lifted her chin. “You hardly looked
  dangerous at the time. And I daresay you lack the strength to offer any threat
  now.”
  
  The barest hint of a s