This morning my little Google Alert pinged with an exciting new review– The Dallas Morning News reviewed OPWM, and once I agreed to subscribe for a week (!), I could actually read it. Luckily, the review was positive, otherwise, I would be very sad about all the Dallas news I now have access to. I’ll post the review below, just in case some of you aren’t subscribers.
Starting on Monday, I’m participating in a week-long virtual short story panel on Goodreads. Do you have a Goodreads profile? I do. Maybe we should be friends there? We probably should. Then we can talk about books and you can see what I’m reading and I can see what you’re reading and the world will be a glorious place.
Cheers! It’s the weekend!
Emma
Book Review: Emma Straub’s Other People We Married
In Emma Straub’s witty debut story collection, Other People We Married, New Yorkers venture outside their home city to see what the rest of America has to offer, and these trips force the realities of their relationships into stark relief.
In “A Map of Modern Palm Springs,” two sisters meet in California for a vacation together. They head to Joshua Tree National Park, about which the local they scored drugs from warned them, “It’s the desert. It’s only exciting if you’ve never been there before.” It also can be exciting if you take hallucinogenic mushrooms, which the older, more settled and successful sister does, prompting the younger sister to consider ditching her.
In the touching “Hot Springs Eternal,” Richard and Teddy, a gay couple from New York, visit Glenwood Springs in Colorado, and Teddy, the younger man, gets a kick out of the rampant bad taste on display, enjoying hotels “that looked on the verge of destruction, with words spelled incorrectly, or ones that looked like cottages where Snow White or the Swiss Miss might work at the front desk.” Their relationship appears doomed at the outset, with Richard feeling older and crankier, and no longer amused with Teddy’s antics, but the story ends with an old-fashioned gesture of chivalry: Richard takes off his T-shirt to reveal the “pale expanse” of belly about which he’s sensitive, and offers it to Teddy, who lacks a shirt.
In the quirky “Fly-Over State,” a New York woman named Susan finds herself sentenced to Wisconsin, where her husband has taken an academic job, and she has little to do but study the habits of the locals, in particular the grown son of her neighbors, who introduces himself as “Mud” and lives in his parents’ basement. Although she fears Mud is a “serial killer,” Susan takes to him, as he displays “the first sign of unfriendliness” she’s encountered since moving to Wisconsin. Mud asks whether living New York is like it is in the movies, and she thinks, “nothing was as much like the movies as the last month of my life, when strange women brought me lemonade and baked goods, which I then consumed without worry that I was being poisoned for the lease to my Co-Op.”
A fly-over state resident reading a collection like this might worry that the writer is going to make fun of other parts of the country, or depict non-New Yorkers behaving in some prejudiced or provincial way, but Straub doesn’t. Instead she’s out to convey the charm and unique attributes of the variety of places she depicts, even if she does take time to delight in each locale’s home-grown kitsch.
Some of Straub’s stories are most memorable for their amusing one-liners, such as this one from “Some People Must Really Fall in Love”: “A waiter appeared next to us, a kid with a beaded necklace and a surfer’s tan. I hated for him to find out we were in Ohio ; how painful that would be.” But there are other stories that build a deeper resonance, particularly those that move beyond an examination of the romantic and professional dissatisfaction of young adults, such as the moving “Puttanesca,” which explores the complicated feelings of a woman who was widowed at a young age as she tries to carry on with a subsequent relationship, and in “Marjorie and the Birds,” about another widow who begins to take bird-watching classes at the Museum of Natural History.
A good sense of humor is a great place to start as a writer, and Emma Straub is off to a promising beginning with these funny, sensitive stories.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, is being released this month by The Permanent Press. She is the Books & Writers Editor of NewWest.Net.
