BIG OF YOU

Nine short stories of (mostly) women fed up with whatever life is serving.

Though the stories aren’t connected, the collection has a shared universe of ideas, characters, and certainly a repetition of aggrieved narrative voice. “Once Then Suddenly Later,” about the 19th-century photographer Félix Nadar, is a short story “written” by Ivy Segal, a character mentioned in “Return to Forever” and then featured in “Take Ten”; Paisley is the narrator of “Penetrating Wind Over Open Lake,” about two music students competing for the same small slice of genius; then her envious boyfriend is narrating his own later life in “Sounds Like.” The strongest stories, “Arnhem” and “Dig!,” cover 40 years of Marianne as she navigates divorce, professional upheaval, and, through it all, an obsession with her childhood friend, “a star, a dark inferno, in my life.” As teenagers they hitchhike through Europe, perpetually on the edge of disaster, and visit her friend’s brother, Shane, on an archeological dig in England. Marianne, sexually entangled with her friend, nevertheless has a crush on Shane, who is in an incestuous relationship with his sister. Marianne becomes a writer and bumps into Shane at a conference in Venice—he growls; she continues to stalk him decades later. Another standout, “Witch Well,” is about the disintegration of a women whose teenage son dies; her witchy rebellion is an utter disregard for her house, appearance, and neighbors in their manicured gated community. Also “Return to Forever,” about four artist friends girl-tripping in Joshua Tree, where they seem to forget everything. Throughout, the writing is like a Modernist poem: “Finally we are old. In the desert, we peruse the orange boxcar”—filled with startling images, but also half-thoughts and half- sentences, leaving the reader, like the characters, on the tenterhooks of understanding.

Fiction that makes artful demands, and in return, offers substantial rewards.