At her worst (which is still quite good), her stories feel a little too comfortable, and I wonder how much more she could do if she experimented. And the author latches onto her own reader’s experience when describing this character’s concerns: “She felt pity for the Africans’ dripping wounds…well, curiosity, at any rate.”Īt her best, Pearlman invigorates our curiosity about others, encouraging us to flip page after page just to see what a character ate for lunch. In one of her most visceral stories, Pearlman’s leading lady has discovered, in her middle age, a worthwhile cause (protesting genital mutilation) and a latent physical attraction (same-sex). But it’s inquisitiveness, not the need to relate, that drives her narratives. With all these heart-tugging human experiences, it’s surprising that Pearlman’s stories aren’t more empathetic. In “Stone,” a past-her-prime New Yorker who temporarily transplants herself to her nephew’s remote stone house considers a way to bring music into her relatives’ lives: “She could will her own Steinway to them and then fling herself onto the Falls, but she’d just smash her kneecaps on the rocks.” Pearlman’s characters are nothing if not practical, but such quiet, often romantic, revelations give her stories the sharpness they need to be believed. She slices into the facade of the everyday, into her characters’ bellies, and simple sentences slip by to reveal the fissures and foibles that are essential to humanity. I cannot imagine a more humdrum-seeming place, yet within the minutiae, Pearlman creates something extraordinary. Many of her stories return to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb and probable stand-in for her own Brookline. They take cruises and are knowledgeable about antiques and ancient poetry. Generally, her characters are well-off and clever. In her first collection since the award-winning 2011 Binocular Vision-the book that, after decades of stellar writing, brought the 78-year-old to the public’s attention-Pearlman once again gives us rather ordinary people and the simple, yet beguiling, details that constitute their lives.

I would like her to be known as the Goldilocks of short narratives: When she combines these neatly constrained features into a single tale, the result is a shining snow globe, an admirably forged crystalline structure we can peer into and gawk at. Little, Brown and Company $25.Įdith Pearlman’s delicate stories balance on the head of a pin, composed of just enough action, just enough interiority, just enough description. If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.By Edith Pearlman. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) Book Review: Of tale and teller - The Jerusalem Post

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