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Becky Ohlsen

Fiction

An epic web of tangled lives

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Lost opportunities, found art, stories both true and false—these ideas bind the disparate threads of Jess Walter’s new novel, Beautiful Ruins. Walter has always been a versatile writer. His 2005 novel, Citizen Vince, put an ex-criminal in witness protection in glamourless Spokane, Washington (where the author lives). The Zero, a 2006 National Book Award finalist, was a darkly inventive, almost surreal look at a cop’s unraveling after 9/11. And in 2009 Walter satirized the recession-era struggle toward the American Dream in The Financial Lives of the Poets. So, even if we call this novel a romance, anyone who knows Walter knows it’s more complicated than that.

For one thing, the book spans 50 years and two continents. It opens in 1962 in a small Italian fishing village. A tragically beautiful Hollywood actress arrives for a stay at the Hotel Adequate View, Pasquale Tursi’s humble pensione. The actress has cancer; she’s here to meet her lover, who will take her to a specialist in Switzerland. This, at any rate, is the story Tursi has been told. The actress’ stay is brief but electrifying, utterly transforming his life.

Meanwhile, in modern-day Holly­wood, a young producer’s assistant despairs over the cynical deals her boss has been making. She’s on the verge of quitting her job when a remarkable story wanders into her office. Also meanwhile, in Edinburgh, a 40-something musician risks one last effort at touring, blows it completely and calls his aging mother for rescue.

These stories and others soon reveal themselves to be one big story, a web of human weaknesses and noble sacrifice. Each character wears a facade that hides his or her true self; what drives the story is when and how those false fronts crumble. As ever, some of these folks are deeply sympathetic and some are exasperating. But, importantly, they (nearly) all learn and change and grow.

If Beautiful Ruins has a weak point, it’s a slightly awkward section with the actor Richard Burton (ironic how a character who’s a real person comes across as less real than the others). But generally, Walter’s control of tone and the various voices is solid. The multiple storylines culminate in a last-chapter pastiche that distills the book’s view that every story is a pitch—and it’s up to readers whether to see that as depressing, hopeful or merely human nature.

Lost opportunities, found art, stories both true and false—these ideas bind the disparate threads of Jess Walter’s new novel, Beautiful Ruins. Walter has always been a versatile writer. His 2005 novel, Citizen Vince, put an ex-criminal in witness protection in glamourless Spokane, Washington (where the author lives). The Zero, a 2006 National Book Award finalist, […]
NonfictionMemoir

Searching for a mother through images

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her mother is not, immediately, a memoir about her mother. Or at any rate, it’s not only that. Bechdel—whose previous book, 2006’s excellent Fun Home, centered on the volatile presence of her closeted gay father and the funeral home where she grew up—here delves deeply and bravely into her own complicated psyche as well as her mother’s. More than anything, Are You My Mother? is an excavation, digging into Bechdel’s relationship with psycho­analysis and, in particular, with the work of a groundbreaking doctor named Donald Winnicott.

As she struggles to come to terms with her mother, Bechdel writes about the emotional and psychic fallout from her first book, the periods of depression that she and her mother and (she discovers) her grandmother all endured, her difficulties in romantic partnerships with other women and, above all, her yearning for some sign of validation or approval from her mother. In other words—though Bechdel is as scathingly funny as ever—this is not exactly light reading. Even structurally, the book is far from straightforward; it is, as her mother notes in the final chapter, “a meta book.” Each chapter begins with a dream Bechdel recalls, the significance of which becomes clear bit by bit as the story moves along.

Epiphanies in real life don’t necessarily happen in chronological order, and they don’t here, either; often it’s not until she checks a date in one of her old journals that Bechdel realizes how two events fit together, how they inform her view of herself. In flashbacks and “photocopies,” she recreates therapy sessions, diary entries, her father’s letters to her mother, her own conversations and arguments with lovers, memories of plays her mother acted in when Bechdel was a child and relevant writings by Virginia Woolf and the fascinating Winnicott. These form a pastiche, kind of a psychic map, which might have been confusing for the reader except that Bechdel’s narrative control is so strong. And visually, the book is so consistent and the drawings so clean that the pages never look messy or disorganized, despite the level of detail on each.

Though the material she’s working with is incredibly rich and multi­layered, both intellectually and emotionally complex, Bechdel makes it easy to follow her journey inward. You’ll be glad you did.

Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her mother is not, immediately, a memoir about her mother. Or at any rate, it’s not only that. Bechdel—whose previous book, 2006’s excellent Fun Home, centered on the volatile presence of her closeted gay father and the funeral home where she grew up—here delves deeply and bravely into her own […]
FilmArts & Culture

Confronting the ‘Stalker’

Review by Becky Ohlsen

I would read Geoff Dyer on any subject—partly because his writing is always unfailingly beautiful, and partly because to read him on any subject is to read him on pretty much every subject. He’s not inclined to take the shortest, most direct route to his ostensible destination; he likes tangents. He’s often grumpy or depressive, but simultaneously brilliant and hilarious. His book about trying to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, should be required reading for anyone who’s ever thought writing a book sounded like a good idea. Whatever he’s writing about, at least in his nonfiction, Geoff Dyer is always also writing about Geoff Dyer, and about art, and about the fragile intersection of neurosis and inspiration. Among other things.

In his latest, Zona—a meditation on the 1979 film Stalker by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky—Dyer veers off onto such topics as his wife’s eerie resemblance to Natascha McElhone in the Steven Soderbergh remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris; drinking beer in pubs; The Wizard of Oz; three-ways; a Bjork song; the dog he’ll probably never have and lots more.

Which isn’t to imply that the book is scattered. Dyer’s narrative follows the film from beginning to end, shot-by-shot. (He writes in a footnote that he had intended to divide the book into 142 sections, to correspond with the 142 shots in the film, “but then, as I became engrossed and re-engrossed in the film, I kept losing track of where one shot ended and another began.”) The effect is similar to that of a really top-notch commentary track, or of watching a familiar movie with someone much more observant and insightful than yourself. Someone who’s also maybe slightly off-kilter and very good at brutally honest self-analysis.

Dyer’s visual descriptions are so meticulous and detailed that you could easily enjoy the book even without having seen Stalker—although that would sort of be missing the point. I think the best approach is to watch the film once, then read the book, then re-watch the film with Dyer’s voice in your head. The very dedicated might also note and seek out the several other titles mentioned in the text and the copious footnotes (the footnotes are substantial, often covering multiple pages, and are not to be missed). It’ll be the most fun you can possibly have watching a long, gray, beautiful, poetic, slow-moving Russian film about the search for hope and self-discovery.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

I would read Geoff Dyer on any subject—partly because his writing is always unfailingly beautiful, and partly because to read him on any subject is to read him on pretty much every subject. He’s not inclined to take the shortest, most direct route to his ostensible destination; he likes tangents. He’s often grumpy or depressive, […]
Fiction

A marriage goes all in

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Stewart O’Nan (Emily, Alone) has packed a huge amount of emotion into this slim novel. In less than 200 pages, he manages to examine the whole history of a marriage—complete with excess baggage, lingering resentments, equal amounts of frustration and fondness. The Odds takes place over a single weekend—Valentine’s Day weekend—when Art and Marion head to Niagara Falls for what is ostensibly a second honeymoon. The truth is that this trip is the couple’s last resort. What their friends and grown children don’t know is that Art and Marion are on the verge, simultaneously, of bankruptcy and divorce. Their plan is to risk all the cash they have left in one big blowout gambling weekend, before they finally admit defeat and attempt to start from scratch.

In concise chapters that begin with a relevant statistic (“Odds of a U.S. citizen filing for bankruptcy: 1 in 17”) and alternate between Marion’s and Art’s points of view, we discover exactly how this entirely non-extravagant couple arrived in their unhappy situation. Timely without being even slightly dry, the novel looks at today’s brutal economy through a lens that’s entirely focused on the personal and emotional consequences.

O’Nan is adept at describing the way certain personality characteristics (competitiveness, shyness, optimism) combined with certain circumstances (unemployment, a house in need of repair) can end up pitting two people against each other despite their mutual affection. The arguments and resentments that Art and Marion have seem so realistic because they’re baffling for both parties; neither spouse particularly wants to fight. Both are often confused as to how and why an argument started. And they each cling to old guilt and old grudges they know they should abandon but can’t quite let go, even when they genuinely wish they could. The story isn’t as grim as that may sound—O’Nan laces his harsh truths with plenty of humor, and even his sort of brittle, difficult characters are endearing. He also never abandons the possibility that things will work out. The Odds is a painful but well-executed portrait of ordinary human weakness and its aftermath.

RELATED CONTENT
Read an interview with Stewart O'Nan for The Odds.

Stewart O’Nan (Emily, Alone) has packed a huge amount of emotion into this slim novel. In less than 200 pages, he manages to examine the whole history of a marriage—complete with excess baggage, lingering resentments, equal amounts of frustration and fondness. The Odds takes place over a single weekend—Valentine’s Day weekend—when Art and Marion head […]
Fiction

An unforgettable journey

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Reading Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel is a bit like settling in with a skilled raconteur as he pages unhurriedly through an old photo album. The novel is structured as a man’s reminiscences about what has turned out to be the defining event of his life: a three-week journey by steamship from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England taken in 1954, when he was 11 years old. (Ondaatje, born in Sri Lanka, made a similar journey as a youth, although he has said the novel isn’t especially autobiographical.)

“This journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth,” muses our narrator, Michael. “With just three or four children at its centre, on a voyage whose clear map and sure destination would suggest nothing to fear or unravel.” This, of course, is not the way the trip turns out.

The book’s title, The Cat’s Table, comes from a phrase describing the place in the dining room that is farthest from the captain’s table. Michael and two other boys his age are assigned to this table, along with a micro-community of traveling oddballs, and the story unfolds as the boy (and the reader) gets to know them. Even the minor characters have rich and surprising histories. One man maintains a lush garden hidden deep in the belly of the ship. One plays piano under a pseudonym. One never speaks at all and wears a bandana over his throat. And there’s a pale, wallflower-y woman who, the boys learn, is much more than meets the eye. Also on the ship are Michael’s cousin Emily, a sparkling beauty; several members of an acrobatic troupe; and a prisoner, an object of instant fascination for the boys. He’s said to have killed a judge, and is taken out each evening to walk the deck in his chains.

At first, the adult Michael’s reflections on his journey seem to meander: There are lots of gripping stories, but there isn’t immediately a clear story arc. It’s only much later in the book that you begin to understand how these recollections all fit together, and what a complex and thorough hold that brief journey had over everyone who took it.

Reading Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel is a bit like settling in with a skilled raconteur as he pages unhurriedly through an old photo album. The novel is structured as a man’s reminiscences about what has turned out to be the defining event of his life: a three-week journey by steamship from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Reality vs. the dream

Review by Becky Ohlsen

For the past century or so, Bulgaria has served as a sort of unwitting laboratory for political change in the western world; communism, socialism and capitalism have all swept through and had their way with the place. So it makes sense that Rana Dasgupta would set his new novel here: Solo is the story of a 100-year-old Bulgarian man, who happens to be an amateur chemist with an ad hoc lab in his apartment, reflecting on his life as it was shaped by the huge, transformative, uncontrollable forces of history.

But Solo isn’t really a political novel, though politics infuse every page. It’s a love story, in a way, but more than that it’s a story about squelched love, truncated passions. The old man, Ulrich, is confined to his apartment in Sofia. He has been blind for years; his neighbors stop by to give him food and medicine. The first half of the novel follows Ulrich’s efforts to piece together and make sense of his childhood and early life. As a boy, Ulrich fell madly in love with music, but his father banished it from the household. So he turned to his second love, chemistry. He dreamed of becoming a great inventor and boosting his country’s industrial sophistication. He went to Berlin to study chemistry with the scientists who were at the forefront of innovation at the time, but then his mother, penniless and on the wrong side of the latest political shift, called him home.

With both his obsessions lost to him, Ulrich gets a job managing a factory. He marries his best friend’s sister and has a son, but loses them as well. He descends into poverty and chaos, like his homeland. As charming and eloquent as Ulrich is, his melancholy trudge through his own bleak history threatens to become a serious downer.

But just as things start to seem impossibly hopeless, the novel explodes into its delightful second half. Ulrich has survived his grim existence, it turns out, by daydreaming constantly: “His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense.” The daydreams were, Dasgupta tells us, “a life’s endeavor of sorts.” In this part of the novel, we follow Ulrich’s dreamed-up children, who are free to roam where he cannot and pursue the passions that were denied him. It’s an illustration of the theory that an urge suppressed in one place will spring forth in another, and that every great achievement is built on multiple great failures. (Albert Einstein pops up here and there to embody this theme.)

Ulrich’s daydreams are more vivid than any of the actual life experiences he details, and in the book‘s second half Dasgupta‘s already gorgeous writing becomes doubly concentrated. (Here, for instance, is one character describing the sounds of New York City: “the stricken alarm of reversing trucks, the industrial growl of electronic shutters, the hydraulic sigh of brakes.”) We’re lulled by Ulrich’s spare existence, then suddenly freed into his kaleidoscopic imagination; it’s a thrilling lesson on the power of an inner life to transcend the circumstances of history.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

For the past century or so, Bulgaria has served as a sort of unwitting laboratory for political change in the western world; communism, socialism and capitalism have all swept through and had their way with the place. So it makes sense that Rana Dasgupta would set his new novel here: Solo is the story of […]
Fiction

Skippy Dies

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Does anyone really ever get over adolescence? Maybe some, but even if you’re one of the lucky ones, reading Paul Murray’s new novel will bring all the roiling, churning madness of being a teenager right back into focus. The book claws into you right away, and its vividness never fades—impressive, considering it’s nearly 700 pages long.

The novel is huge, in scope and theme as well as physical size. Set at an Irish boarding school called Seabrook, it follows roommates Daniel (‘Skippy’) and Ruprecht and a handful of their friends and teachers. As the title indicates, Skippy dies in the first few pages, at a donut shop, and the rest of the book is a backward and forward exploration of how, why, and what it means to everyone involved.

Murray writes from a wide range of perspectives, including ‘Howard the Coward,’ a sweet but inept history teacher; Carl, a warped young thug; Lori, the beautiful mess of a girl Carl and Skippy are both in love with; Father Green, a priest who’s taught at Seabrook for eons but feels the religious leadership losing its hold; and the Automator, the school’s acting principal, a terrifying embodiment of brisk efficiency and the secular business-model approach to education. There’s even a chapter narrated by donut-shop manager. Multiple narrators can create a jittery, patchwork feel, but Murray writes so beautifully and distributes the voices so perfectly that, here, breadth becomes depth.

Skippy Dies is about all kinds of big things, including faith, death, love, lust, parenting, betrayal, revenge, class, fantasy, old guard vs. young turk, the shimmering false paradise of drugs, the fundamental structure of the universe. But it’s the little things that fix the story in your heart: the Seabrook boys’ spirited conversations, the finely observed detail, the unflinching depiction of emotions. Here’s Skippy observing his father one evening: “From the corner of his eye Skippy watches him watching the white dot zip over the green field between the different-coloured men, his face emptied out, his hand plucking emptily at the arm of the armchair, rolling together little balls of fuzz then pulling them free.” That sentence, like the novel, contains equal parts joy and sadness: joy in the delights of language, sadness at the messy unfairness of life.

Does anyone really ever get over adolescence? Maybe some, but even if you’re one of the lucky ones, reading Paul Murray’s new novel will bring all the roiling, churning madness of being a teenager right back into focus. The book claws into you right away, and its vividness never fades—impressive, considering it’s nearly 700 pages […]

Jaw-dropping, gravity-defying facts

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Mary Roach has a penchant for tracking down the answers to the questions you never knew you had about the human body. People reading her books often wear the same expressions as people watching gory movies. Her sideways curiosity has led her to write about the fate of cadavers (Stiff) and the science of sex (Bonk). With Packing for Mars, she investigates what happens to our normally earthbound selves when we’re blasted off into zero gravity. It’s an utterly fascinating account, made all the more entertaining by the author’s ever-amused tone.

Roach takes enormous delight in what she does. Not surprising, considering that what she does leads her to chat about things like “fecal popcorn” and in-helmet upchucking, and the fact that only half the human population is capable of lighting its farts. Who wouldn’t have fun asking strait-laced NASA scientists to explain how one gets a “good seal” on a space toilet? Clearly, this is not your typical sober examination of the mission to conquer space. Roach is interested in heroics and technological awesomeness, but she’s even more interested in what those things do to humble human bodies. Accordingly, she homes in on the most bizarre and surprising details in the history of space travel.

Of course, it’s not all about the gags. Roach has a larger theme underlying her frequently goofy presentation: “One of the things I love about manned space exploration,” she writes, “is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn’t acceptable.” The difficulties and indignities of space travel, she argues, are worthwhile because they teach us what is possible—they bring “a back-handed nobility” to our wilder ambitions. They remind us that wacky, silly, fun things can also be profoundly important. Laugh and learn.

Related content:
See our interview with Mary Roach about Packing for Mars.
 

Mary Roach has a penchant for tracking down the answers to the questions you never knew you had about the human body. People reading her books often wear the same expressions as people watching gory movies. Her sideways curiosity has led her to write about the fate of cadavers (Stiff) and the science of sex […]
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Girl in Translation

Review by Becky Ohlsen

It’s no easy trick to age a character 20 years in 300 pages and never once let the narrative voice falter or sound jarring. But Girl in Translation is no ordinary coming-of-age novel. Or rather, it is ordinary, in the sense of being universal, even though the story’s primary setting will strike most readers as exotic and unfamiliar.

Kimberly Chang is an 11-year-old who has just come to America with her widowed mother. Their only contact in the U.S. is Kimberly’s aunt, Paula, who comes across as petty and begrudging. She sets Kimberly and her mother up in an apartment, making a big show of her generosity, but it’s a condemned ruin in a rough part of Brooklyn. Kimberly and her mother owe huge debts to Paula, so they don’t complain; in fact, they go to work in her clothing factory for illegally low pay. Meanwhile, Kimberly struggles to be the A student she was in Hong Kong, despite barely speaking English. She has no phone, can’t go out at night and wears handmade clothing, which essentially makes her a social pariah. And she has a debilitating crush on a boy who works at her Aunt Paula’s factory.

The story has the weight of fate, partly because of its universal themes and partly because of the intermittent references to Chinese traditions and traditional ways of thinking and talking. Jean Kwok, who, like Kimberly, came to Brooklyn from Hong Kong as a young girl, lets her remarkable protagonist develop at her own pace. Kimberly begins to learn English, and picks up buried meanings in the Chinese words she thought she knew. Sometimes she translates idiomatic expressions for the reader—a charming touch that just borders on being overdone. At any rate, Kimberly is such a sympathetic narrator that you’d forgive her anything. This is tested in the book’s final twist, when she makes a series of impossible choices that change everything. Even as you worry about what might happen, you trust her—after all, you’ve watched her grow up.

It’s no easy trick to age a character 20 years in 300 pages and never once let the narrative voice falter or sound jarring. But Girl in Translation is no ordinary coming-of-age novel. Or rather, it is ordinary, in the sense of being universal, even though the story’s primary setting will strike most readers as exotic […]
Fiction

Making the most out of the hereafter

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Lucy Fisher is having the worst week of her life. Her dream vacation in Hawaii, which cost her pretty much everything she had, was a huge disappointment, and when she arrives home she finds herself locked out of the house she shares with her fiancé, all of her possessions strewn about the lawn. As if that’s not enough, she’s falsely accused of trying to steal money from her employer and consequently loses her job. That’s when things really start to go downhill. Lucy goes to stay with her sister, hoping for a chance to get back on her feet, but on her way to the unemployment office, Lucy is unceremoniously flattened by a bus. Talk about a killer week.

In an entertaining twist on the chick-lit formula, Laurie Notaro’s latest novel, Spooky Little Girl, takes its heroine to Ghost School. If she succeeds in the mission assigned to her during school, she can move on to the next phase of after-death, which Notaro calls the State. The afterlife presented here is a kind of yuppie suburbanite’s idea of heaven, complete with catalogues of costumes the ghosts can wear to all their hauntings; there’s probably a Starbucks on every corner, too. This is where the real story begins, in which Lucy attempts to figure out why her fiancé turned her out of her home and, secondarily, why no one showed up at her funeral.

Armed with her new haunting skills, Lucy returns as a ghost to her former home, where no one, oddly, seems to know what happened to Lucy—they all believe she’s just run off, which wouldn’t be uncharacteristic, it seems. By learning how (and why) to haunt the living, the ghost of Lucy Fisher begins to understand who she was and how her own behavior might have affected others’ perceptions of her while she was still alive. Spooky Little Girl isn’t terribly profound, but it’s great fun to spend a couple of hours watching Lucy learn to live death to its fullest.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

Lucy Fisher is having the worst week of her life. Her dream vacation in Hawaii, which cost her pretty much everything she had, was a huge disappointment, and when she arrives home she finds herself locked out of the house she shares with her fiancé, all of her possessions strewn about the lawn. As if […]
Fiction

Sins of the father—and mother

Review by Becky Ohlsen

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is so compelling about Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel. Merely summarizing the plot doesn’t do the book justice—it’s far more gripping than you’d expect from a family drama about the consequences of falling deeper and deeper into credit card debt. The real force of the novel, aside from Zevin’s elegant, no-words-wasted prose, comes from her complicated, multifaceted characters, who have an astonishing capacity for extremes of both generous and selfish behavior.

Zevin has written a number of young adult novels, but the problems she tackles in The Hole We’re In are solidly planted in the adult world, even if the hardest-hit victims are children. Roger Pomeroy is an evangelical patriarch who, at 42, decides that what he needs is to quit his job and return to school full-time. Roger’s wife, Georgia, takes a second job, but without Roger’s salary, and with the wedding of their eldest daughter, Helen, coming up, the family is financially strapped. Unable to pay the bills, Georgia hides them in drawers, pretending everything is fine. When her credit cards are maxed out, she applies for new ones in her children’s names, with dire results. Meanwhile, Roger outdoes himself by carrying on an affair with his academic advisor. Both parents, and their demanding oldest daughter, naturally feel their behavior is entirely justified.

Sadly, the one who ends up paying most for her family’s overextension is the youngest daughter, Patsy. Early in the book, Patsy is banished to her crazy grandmother’s house; she thinks it’s because she was dating a black man, but the real reason is far more sinister and unfair. What she realizes there encapsulates the book’s strongest theme: “For the last 14 days, she’d gone without television, privacy, and regular meals, and consequently she’d had plenty of time for the prayer and reflection that her father believed her to so desperately need. So she’d prayed and reflected and what she’d come to was this: people did what they could live with; all sin was relative.”

If this all sounds incredibly depressing, fear not: Though Patsy’s parents left her a terrible legacy, she’s a tough cookie, and the story allows her the kind of redemption money can’t buy.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is so compelling about Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel. Merely summarizing the plot doesn’t do the book justice—it’s far more gripping than you’d expect from a family drama about the consequences of falling deeper and deeper into credit card debt. The real force of the novel, aside from Zevin’s elegant, […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

The weight of a woman

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Mary Gooch’s biggest problem is not the size of her body, but the scope of her world. At just over 300 pounds, the 43-year-old Canadian is well aware that she’s fat; she has resigned herself to being that way. What she doesn’t realize, though, is the degree to which her weight has insulated and isolated her from the rest of society. She’s spent years in denial about how sheltered her life is, and when she’s forced to see it, the shock is worse than any she’s ever felt upon catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror.

Mary has been quietly accumulating pounds for years when her husband, the tall, handsome Jimmy Gooch, fails to come home one night—specifically, the night before their 25th wedding anniversary. Eventually he sends a note explaining that he has left $25,000 from a winning scratch-lottery ticket in their joint bank account, and that he needs “time to think.” At a loss, Mary sets out to find him, using the only clues she has: his family connections in California, some restaurant receipts and not much else.

Lori Lansens, best-selling author of The Girls, structures The Wife’s Tale as the story of a damaged heroine on a quest. The trick is that (as in any good quest story) the real object of the search isn’t what the searcher thinks it is. Mary’s pursuit of her husband draws her slowly back into the world she’d been hiding from. She takes her first airplane flight, gets a makeover, stands up to her boss and her difficult mother-in-law, makes new friends, learns how to use an ATM card. She finds hidden reserves of endurance; she loses her appetite and her certainty about what her life is built on.

Occasional traces of hackneyed sentiment slip into the novel, but the fast-moving story and Mary’s gradual metamorphosis overcome such flaws easily. By the novel’s satisfying end, Mary has learned that it’s better to strive for balance and control than to hide behind one extreme or another. It’s not a simple transformation, and even if it’s not quite realistic, it certainly rings true.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Mary Gooch’s biggest problem is not the size of her body, but the scope of her world. At just over 300 pounds, the 43-year-old Canadian is well aware that she’s fat; she has resigned herself to being that way. What she doesn’t realize, though, is the degree to which her weight has insulated and isolated […]
FictionShort Stories

The heart of the matter

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Amy Bloom has what I might have thought were magical powers if I hadn’t learned that she’s spent time as a psychotherapist. She can jump from one character’s perspective to another’s in the space of a paragraph, fully inhabiting each, as smoothly and unmistakably as if she were doing impressions of famous people onstage. In two lines she can telegraph the essence of a character’s personality, the sum of his years, the battles he’s won and lost and the ones that still rage. And she seems to be able to do this for anyone: the gout-ridden aging Englishman, the mixed-race teenage girl, the gay neighbor, the adulterous earth mother. The stories she tells in her new collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, vary widely, but she never overreaches or missteps.

That might be because Bloom has one primary concern, and that is the way people act toward and react to one another. Her stories have an almost theatrical quality: she puts several people with complex relationships in a room and lets them have it out—sometimes in dialogue, but mostly through those perfectly tuned inner voices.

Most of the stories are linked, centering on two couples: Clare and William, old friends whose spouses are also friends but who begin a love affair; and Lionel and Julia, a stepson and stepmother who share a secret that eats away at both of them. Some of the Lionel and Julia stories were included in Bloom’s previous collections, but reading them all at once enriches the experience of each; the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts that the book actually feels as weighty as a couple of novels. If there’s a weak spot, it’s “By-and-By,” narrated by a girl whose roommate has been murdered by a serial killer; here the narrative focuses on external details rather than penetrating the psyches of everyone involved. But otherwise, each character’s reaction in every story rings true, because Bloom has taken you deep inside their heads. Maybe she does have magic powers, after all.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Amy Bloom has what I might have thought were magical powers if I hadn’t learned that she’s spent time as a psychotherapist. She can jump from one character’s perspective to another’s in the space of a paragraph, fully inhabiting each, as smoothly and unmistakably as if she were doing impressions of famous people onstage. In […]

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