Tales Are Too Spare to Make Us Care

It’s hard to get people’s attention these days, which may be why the first line of a Susan Perabo story is often so shocking--although shocking in a deadpan way. “After the baby died, I found it imperative that my German shepherd Stu understand and accept the concept of death,” begins the young wife and ex-mother in “Explaining Death to the Dog.” “I was 12 the summer I watched four men beat up my father,” recalls the self-hating narrator of this collection’s eponymous story. The perhaps even unluckier child narrator of “Gravity” introduces himself thus: “It rained the morning of the day we killed Dennis Zeller.”

Like many contemporary American short story writers, Perabo dispenses almost entirely with physical description. We do not know what her characters look like or the kind of clothes they wear or what type of houses they live in. Nor do current events, social or political (aside from the death of Princess Diana), intervene in these stories. This absence of material and social reality reinforces and mirrors the spareness of the characters’ emotional lives. It is a spareness that can be eerie; sometimes, less is less.

Perabo’s tone is never sour, however. She views her sad, bewildered characters with empathy and even injects notes of sweetness and bits of humor into these bleak tales. In “The Measure of Devotion,” two young brothers are touring the Gettysburg battlefield when one wonders what a slave is. “Black people,” his grandmother curtly answers, and his slightly older brother then quickly explicates, “Like Michael Jordan.”

For the most part, though, Perabo’s characters are defined--and confined--by a profound sense of dissociation. And though most of these stories are told in the first-person, her characters are almost entirely devoid of self-knowledge. Generally, bad things happen, and nobody really knows why.

In “Counting the Ways,” a down-on-their luck couple blow their inheritance on a green dress once worn by Princess Diana; when the princess dies, the couple find themselves suddenly, potentially rich, yet this very change in fortunes destroys their marriage. In “Reconstruction,” a mugging victim feigns amnesia in an attempt to win back the wife who has recently left him, but the elaborate ruse proves just how conclusively “they had forgotten how to love each other. And her memory, obviously, was far clearer on this issue than his.”

Perabo’s style is taut and lean. But her work is occasionally marred by glibness (“I was doing temp work. . . . I was also doing temp life,” one character notes).

One of Perabo’s most disturbing stories is “Some Say the World.” It is narrated by an unnamed, heavily sedated 18-year-old pyromaniac who has developed a surprising affinity for her latest stepfather. (The girl’s parents divorced when she was 5, though they have continued to conduct a passionate affair.) As the story closes, the man and the girl visit a carnival; when the two climb aboard a clearly rickety Ferris wheel, the stepfather proclaims convincingly--if not quite reassuringly--that “we’re safer up here than anywhere else in the world.” They make an odd couple, the cuckolded husband who will soon leave his wife and the damaged teenage daughter who can never leave her mother. But their fragile connection is no stranger than those forged by the other characters in this sometimes frustrating, sometimes moving debut collection.