Capturing resilience of the human spirit

Short stories are both humorous and grim

February 04, 2011|Clea Simon

Short stories are like miniatures: A delicate touch makes all the difference. In Edith Pearlman’s world, that light hand means choosing the perfect phrase to capture a moment or a mood. Often it leaves the reader breathless.

In “Binocular Vision,’’ a hefty collection of 34 stories, including 13 new ones, the Brookline-based Pearlman shows her unerring sense for the right words. Sometimes that means she plays with them, as in poetry or music, as in the story “Self Reliance.’’ In this beautiful and hallucinatory offering, a retired gastroenterologist, diagnosed with cancer, chooses where and how to die, and her musings take her from “not nowhere. Somewhere. Herewhere’’ to “elsewhere’’ in the course of a few pages.

Often those spare, almost austere phrases are sprung like little traps. In the title story, for example, a young girl uses her father’s binoculars to spy on the neighbors, imagining a life like and yet unlike her own family’s. Using a voice at once sophisticated and innocent, Pearlman has the young narrator note the details that connect with her experience: “a double bed with an afghan at its foot, folded into a perfect right triangle. This application of geometry to daily life gratified my critical ten-year-old self.’’ The kicker, when it comes, at once shows her how limited the narrator’s vision has been and throws her and the reader into the beginning of troubled adulthood.

Those little shockers, punch lines almost, work partly because Pearlman’s recurring topics are so serious: love and death, and the resilience required by both. Set all over the world, in different times during the last hundred years, and involving characters of all ages, these tales focus on the precise pivotal moments when life changes — often for the worse. Death and dying are common themes, while ill-fated liaisons, frequently involving incest, occur with regularity.