FOOLS FOR LOVE

In her first story collection since 1988, Schulman peeks into the romantic lives of a loosely connected community of characters.

“Many moons ago, my beloved husband, Miguel Herrera—have you heard of him?—gave an earthshaking performance in an event space in the East Village, Henderson Square (actually our friend Hattie Henderson’s studio apartment), which completely changed our lives.” This is the kind of sentence that inspires you to Google “Helen Schulman husband,” be reminded that she’s married to humorist Bruce Handy, and slap your forehead. Right, it’s fiction. Anna Herrera’s tale of her husband Miguel’s appearance in a same-sex performance of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, the play that gives both story and collection its title and theme, is actually the account of how she met her second husband, a marriage we return to in the last story in the book, at which point Herrera is just an “ethnic surname” she picked up “in a short heartbreak of a marriage, a name that has stood me well all these years, grant- and prizewinning-wise.” Also introduced in the first story is Anna’s sixth grade boyfriend, Hershleder, who becomes the antihero of the saddest story, “The Revisionist.” (Schulman notes in an afterword that both this and “P.S.” grew into novels in the years since their creation, making this book interesting for archeologists of her career.) We also meet an agent named Jeannie Elbazz, “who reps Jake Kamins”—both Jeannie and Jake return in “My Best Friend,” a story in which lovelorn foolery reaches dizzying heights. Without attempting to be a novel in stories, the collection is free to go off on wild tangents, such as a story narrated by an evil baby, Lucien H., and a tale of forbidden love with a married Orthodox rabbi in Paris. In multiple stories, people come back from the dead, and everywhere, there are sentences to make you laugh: “Thank God she’d grown up at a time when lunatic sexual behavior was expected; she’d been able to have her cake and eat it whenever she wanted without any damage to her reputation.”

Never underestimate the power of a good short story to lift your spirits.