Many of Edith Pearlman’s short stories involve characters who are listening to others or spying on them—the twin conduits, the detail-rich supply lines, of this subtle writer’s system. Listening is, or should be, intimate, while spying is usually more estranged: Pearlman’s short fiction is interesting for the ways in which it combines proximity and distance. People are closely attended to and swiftly evoked amid the engrossing particulars of life—clothes, households, parents, children, dailiness of all kinds. But Pearlman can also move back from characters, in order to see the entire span of their lives. Then she becomes one of God’s spies, condensing a life into a few sentences, taking on the power of prophecy, knowing—as Psalm 121 describes the Creator—“thy going out and thy coming in.”
Pearlman’s stories have begun to reach a wider audience only since the publication of “Binocular Vision,” in 2011. In the title story of that collection, a ten-year-old girl spies on her neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Simon. From her window, and with the help of binoculars, she fills her vision with the details of their lives—their furniture, their routines, the visits of their housekeeper—but without the knowledge to comprehend what she sees: they are shapes without form. Form, as so often in Pearlman’s stories, asserts itself as death: the moment when a life becomes fatally comprehensible. In this case, though, death brings no understanding. When the little girl learns that Mr. Simon has committed suicide, and, from an obituary, that he is “survived by his mother,” she is surprised. “I thought she was his wife!” she says to her mother. “So did she,” her mother replies, and the narrator senses that she has been admitted “abruptly into the complicated world of adults, making me understand what I had until then only seen.”
Pearlman’s new collection, “Honeydew” (Little, Brown), deepens this fascination with the “complicated world of adults,” and with the difference between seeing and understanding, though with the sober qualification that most adults see through a glass no less darkly than children. It is the writer who sees everything, hears everything, and reserves the right to fiddle with the aperture. Pearlman’s fiction brings together, with uncanny wisdom, short views and long views: the hours of our lives and the length of our lives. She is tender and distant at once. The frequent result is a distinctive wittiness, a lightness and swiftness of tone familiar to readers of Muriel Spark (another writer interested in combining short views and long views).
How efficiently, for instance, Pearlman can compact a minor character: “Aunt Jan Flaxbaum met them there. She was Flax’s diminutive sister, a busy dentist with crooked teeth.” Or a dull evening with a date: “Saturday nights he takes me to the dining room at his club: long windows, long portraits, a lengthy evening.” In “Flowers,” the unexpected arrival of flowers in a not very happy household causes consternation; Pearlman stops to notice the “elaborate ribbon and cellophane bright as tears.” In the book’s first story, “Tenderfoot,” an art historian, newly arrived in town, spies from his third-floor bathroom on a pedicure parlor (he is interested in its widowed owner): “One dark afternoon Bobby saw the red-cheeked chemistry professor and his wife side by side on the chairs as if driving to the movies.” In “Assisted Living,” we encounter the impeccably Yankee Muffy and Stu, brushed in with a few devastating, and very funny, strokes:
Perhaps Pearlman is best seen as a fabulist in realist’s clothing: she densely describes her fictional worlds, yet briskly drives her short tales toward finality (sometimes death, sometimes a happy ending that overcomes death). The relationship between fabulism and realism is difficult to manage, and occasionally Pearlman’s forms seem too narrow for the material; stories are resolved too hastily; the choreography is a little arch. Both “Castle 4” and the book’s title story end with marriages or romantic alliances that seem socially unconvincing, authorially coerced. “Honeydew” is set in a private girls’ school, and involves an anorexic eleventh grader named Emily Knapp; her father, Richard; and the school’s headmistress, Alice Toomey. Official and parental attempts to help Emily with her life-threatening illness are complicated by the fact that Alice and Richard are having an extramarital affair; Alice is six weeks pregnant with their child. The story makes a lively tangle of tensions, develops them for several pages (while also exploring Emily’s anorexia in original and intelligent ways), and then peremptorily knots everything up. Alice, mournful about the future and skeptical that Richard will leave his wife, decides that perhaps Mr. da Sola, the school’s gardener and handyman, will marry her instead: “She could raise his salary.” And that is what happens. The resolution seems thin, and the insouciance of tone, often appealing in Pearlman’s work, feels here like an attempt to pass off the improbable as the inevitable.
But, more often than not, Pearlman’s fictions find the right ratio between fable and story. “Stone” begins like a fairy tale: “She had come south from New York City to live with a small family in a stone house in a flat town. There was lots of wildlife too. She wasn’t much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companionship, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool.” Ingrid, the story’s protagonist, is seventy-two, well off, and has been twice widowed. She is not a fool. She leaves New York on a whim, to work for three months as a bookkeeper for Chris, her first husband’s nephew, who is expanding his carpentry and woodworking business. A story that starts swiftly deepens into leisurely enigma. Ingrid is not quite sure why, but she enjoys being in the country with relatives, and enjoys living simply, in a makeshift bedroom, with Chris and his wife and small daughter:
In the country, Ingrid finds a family she lacks in Manhattan. She has also begun to understand that Chris, who is thirty years younger, and whom she has known all his life, desires her, and that she enjoys, at seventy-two, being so desired. Eventually, though, it is time to return to the city, but Chris would like her to stay. In an extraordinary moment at the end of the story, Ingrid looks ahead, sees with the power of prophecy the end of her days, and silently voices all the objections to her staying: “But I see farther than you. I see myself weakening, getting querulous, not useless but not useful either. . . . I see you mourning the loss of your longing.” Neither tragic nor fearful, the story vibrates with a wonderfully calm power of resignation.
“Hat Trick” explores and allegorizes such resignation. At some moment in the nineteen-fifties, four nineteen-year-old girls, Helen, June, Sallyann, and Marcie, are discussing boys, and their “ideal mate.” Sallyann’s mother breaks in to tell them that it doesn’t really matter whom they choose—“All cats are gray at night,” she says, by which she means (she is very much a woman of her time) that men are largely interchangeable, and “any reasonable couple can . . . invent its own romance.” To prove her point, she suggests that the four girls throw twelve pieces of paper into the hat, each with a different boy’s name on it. Then each girl will try to catch whichever boy she draws from the hat, and marry him. It’ll be like an arranged marriage, she says, and you will be happy—or “happy enough.” Let “the best matchmaker in the universe” arrange the marriages: “Chance.”
The girls pluck their names and act accordingly. The story shifts from the near-at-hand to long lens. Marcie marries Biff. Helen marries Steve (“She was protected by his devotion for the next forty years, through all their woes”). June, who tore up her piece of paper so that no one knew whose name was on it, does not marry, and becomes a biologist. And Sallyann, who drew a blank piece of paper, marries three times. “Who could have known that the girls would play it so seriously,” Sallyann’s mother reflects, years later, as she lies dying in her bed.
It is a formally perfect story, in which the balance between fable and sternly rationed realism is expertly managed; it is light and rueful, playful and poignant. And it is a story about a trick that is itself a deep literary trick, because, in fiction, another name for Chance is authorial control. It is not Sallyann but Pearlman—the author of a notable story in “Binocular Vision” titled “Chance”—who sets up the game, and who makes the girls follow it; and it is Pearlman (like Muriel Spark in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) who gives us the godlike power to peer down the long, dizzying corridors of their lives.
Pearlman’s dearest subject may indeed be adequate happiness. She is interested in sustainable marriages, feasible relationships, functional contentment: whatever will last a lifetime. And seeing death steadily and calmly as life’s predicate, as the dark backing on the other side of the mirror (as Saul Bellow once put it), the necessary obverse, is an essential element of that wisdom. One of the most moving stories in this book, “Blessed Harry,” is explicitly about happiness and life and death. The Flaxbaums, who live in Godolphin, Massachusetts (Pearlman’s fictional version of Brookline, the Boston suburb where she lives), are cultured, antic, and happy. Myron Flaxbaum teaches Latin at Caldicott Academy (the same school that featured in the title story of “Honeydew”—Pearlman enjoys linking her tales); his wife, Bonnie, is a nurse; and there are three noisy, clever sons, Sean, Leo, and Felix. “Dinner-table conversations,” Bonnie thinks, “were full of information, not always accurate, and full of earnest misquotations; the boys’ manners if not always perfect were adequate, and the dining-room mirror obediently reflected them all.”
An invitation to give a lecture arrives in Myron’s e-mail folder: would he like to come to London and talk to eight hundred and fifty people about “The Mystery of Life and Death”? Myron is slow to accept what the rest of his family suspect from the start: that the invitation is a hoax. But the notion of the lecture, and its broad topic, makes Myron and Bonnie metaphysically reflective, and Pearlman’s story contracts and expands its perspectives to accommodate such reflection. Bonnie, watching her children at dinner beneath the mirror, sees ahead as Ingrid does in “Stone.” She sees how the five Flaxbaums, crowding the dining-room mirror each night, will disappear “when the last of them underwent the physiological necessity of individual extinction, when the last memory of the last of them was gone.” But Bonnie finds nothing disturbing in the thought: “What counted was how you behaved while death let you live, and how you met death when life released you. That was the long and short of it. Her honorable spouse could instruct those overeducated Brits, all 850 of them, just by his example.”
Later, at four in the morning, Myron encounters his eldest son, Sean, in the kitchen. They talk about schoolwork (Sean has an imminent exam), about what Sean would like to become (a physicist and a poet). “Medio tutissimus ibis,” Sean’s father says, and the son translates, “You will be safest in the middle.” (All three boys know their Ovid.) Son and father regard each other, and Myron says, or perhaps merely thinks, the following: “My son, I remember when our family was only you and your mother and I. . . . I remember when this refrigerator was hung with your nursery drawings. I remember when you put your child’s hand so gently against Leo’s infant cheek, silk touching silk, I remember so much, I would keep you here until morning telling you, beloved boy, but now I must go to bed.”
“To me, a short story is a conversation between writer and reader,” Pearlman has said. “Since only the writer can speak, she must take care to respect the reader, to avoid telling him what to think, to say as little as possible and imply the rest with metaphor, ellipses, allusive dialogue, pauses.” It is a conventional enough literary assumption, but in her hands it produces singular work, in which an adult writer, full of parental tact, yet throbbing with restrained tenderness, treats both her characters and her readers as adults. These days, it seems almost radical. ♦
