Bleakness behind the bright
By Haley Tanner |
July 15, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
FRANCES writes grant proposals at a nonprofit agency, bums cigarettes from the graphics guy and refuses to marry her financier boyfriend because he isn't willing to eat soft cheese. Deirdre, on the fence about her pregnancy and her boyfriend, escapes to the family cottage only to find it infested by mice she cannot bring herself to kill. Maureen, a freewheeling ex-vegan, finds herself in over her head when the porn star she met at the mall comes to her apartment and begins to masturbate on her couch.
The characters whose lives are loosely connected in Stephanie Reents' first story collection, "The Kissing List," wade waist-deep through the muck of uncertainty that awaits college women after graduation. In Reents's account, to be 20-something and in the city is to wander a purgatorial landscape of postgraduate inertia, premarital indecision and proto-careerist yearning.
These stories are often funny, but there's a satisfying dark edge to all the ridiculous quarter-life-crisis floundering. Frances trades alleyway sex with a stranger for a designer dress. After mustering the nerve to kill a mouse, Deirdre is disappointed to find herself no closer to courage regarding her own life. For these women, Reents suggests, life is more frightening and disorienting than amusing. As with Maureen's uninvited guest, the world is truly lonesome and the desperation truly heartbreaking.
Reents saves the "kissing list" itself for her two finest characters. Sylvie and Laurie's bet (first to kiss five people wins two weeks' rent) might seem trivial, but - as in so many of Reents's portrayals of this fraught stage of life - the bleak lurks behind the bright. Young, beautiful and full of life, Laurie is also dying of brain cancer. The hot waiters she'll meet, the men who'll notice her legs, these are as finite as the names she'll be able to add to the list.
Reents' talent is for straightforward observation, her greatest strength the confidence to let the tiny daggers of truth flash for themselves. "They've always believed that I'll live," Laurie says of her friends. "And when I was still optimistic, this suited me, but now their hopefulness fits me like old clothes." The horrifying absurdity of dying young serves less as a background than as a foreground to the lives of Reents's other characters.
The weight of Laurie's experience overshadows much of "The Kissing List." While Laurie's narrative has all the weight of sad reality, in other stories the emotional pulse is obscured by characters' confusion.
These small concerns aside, Reents weaves the book's stories together with humor, grief and slender prose, giving us all a glimpse - or a reminder - of what it feels like to wonder whether one "is still light enough to touch down softly, or how she'll feel when she finishes turning into something new."
The characters whose lives are loosely connected in Stephanie Reents' first story collection, "The Kissing List," wade waist-deep through the muck of uncertainty that awaits college women after graduation. In Reents's account, to be 20-something and in the city is to wander a purgatorial landscape of postgraduate inertia, premarital indecision and proto-careerist yearning.
These stories are often funny, but there's a satisfying dark edge to all the ridiculous quarter-life-crisis floundering. Frances trades alleyway sex with a stranger for a designer dress. After mustering the nerve to kill a mouse, Deirdre is disappointed to find herself no closer to courage regarding her own life. For these women, Reents suggests, life is more frightening and disorienting than amusing. As with Maureen's uninvited guest, the world is truly lonesome and the desperation truly heartbreaking.
Reents saves the "kissing list" itself for her two finest characters. Sylvie and Laurie's bet (first to kiss five people wins two weeks' rent) might seem trivial, but - as in so many of Reents's portrayals of this fraught stage of life - the bleak lurks behind the bright. Young, beautiful and full of life, Laurie is also dying of brain cancer. The hot waiters she'll meet, the men who'll notice her legs, these are as finite as the names she'll be able to add to the list.
Reents' talent is for straightforward observation, her greatest strength the confidence to let the tiny daggers of truth flash for themselves. "They've always believed that I'll live," Laurie says of her friends. "And when I was still optimistic, this suited me, but now their hopefulness fits me like old clothes." The horrifying absurdity of dying young serves less as a background than as a foreground to the lives of Reents's other characters.
The weight of Laurie's experience overshadows much of "The Kissing List." While Laurie's narrative has all the weight of sad reality, in other stories the emotional pulse is obscured by characters' confusion.
These small concerns aside, Reents weaves the book's stories together with humor, grief and slender prose, giving us all a glimpse - or a reminder - of what it feels like to wonder whether one "is still light enough to touch down softly, or how she'll feel when she finishes turning into something new."
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