Holding up a mirror to a rudderless culture

August 21, 2011|By Richard Eder

(Sonia Pulido )

THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY By Caitlin Horrocks

Sarabande, 169 pp., paperback, $15.95

Superficially there seems little to link the stories in Caitlin Horrocks’s debut collection, “This Is Not Your City.’’ A woman recalls her cruelty to a dying childhood friend; a man offers a loving home to dogs whose owners can no longer keep them, only to sell them for laboratory experiments; an unqualified young teacher devises weird punishments to keep her class in order; a couple on a cruise boasts to fellow passengers about the brilliance of a severely handicapped child institutionalized back home.

What many of the stories have in common is startlingly ingenious writing and a note of what could be called sprightly heartbreak. There is an offhand jauntiness in telling terrible things. The dissonance is sometimes gratuitous, but in the better stories, the blithely appalling character of what goes on intends a reflection on the unmoored values of a have-it-all and have-a-nice-day society. (The cruise couple would find it shameful to present anything but a bright face to the world.)

Such values have corrupted and malformed the younger generation in “Steal Small.’’ Horrocks’s wild, yet delicately handled satire gives Swiftian slash to the benumbing news stories about the lack of youthful job opportunity. All that the likable Leo has been able to find is working a bolt gun to kill cattle in a slaughterhouse. (It must be carefully done, he explains; otherwise the animals will be hustled down the line and butchered alive.) To make more money he runs the dog operation. His girlfriend, the narrator, has a scruple or two but is inhibited from challenging him by her own shame at failure to confront a neighbor who’d regularly bribed her little sister to have sex. A generation that avoids wave making, Horrocks implies.

“Zero Conditional’’ reflects another link between societal and individual abdication. Eril, feckless and indifferent, has tried for a host of assorted jobs. Finally, without credentials, she is hired as a third-grade teacher by a phony Montessori-type school. Discipline breaks down: She devises such punishments as cutting off the hair of a girl who passes notes, making a boy sit on a pin, having the entire class stand barefoot in the frozen schoolyard. The principal, unable to hire proper teachers, overlooks it.

But the chain of indifference had started earlier. Eril’s parents, having brought her up in a comfortable suburb, suddenly move to Arizona to live easy, leaving Eril, suddenly unsupported, to find a grotty apartment. Nobody is bound to anybody.