Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Everything My Mother Taught Me” is told from a child’s point of view. Adeline Ivey is only twelve for most of the story, but in the tradition of fiction told from a child’s perspective, she is wise beyond her years. Perhaps her wisdom benefits from hindsight, although Adeline’s age at the time she tells the story is unclear. The narrative voice is distinctly Alice Hoffman’s and it does not match a twelve-year-old whose education has been minimal. It is therefore fair to assume that Adeline is telling the story at a later stage in her life. Still, Adeline portrays herself as having a deeper understanding of human nature than would be typical of a child raised in relative isolation.

The story is set in 1908, a time when women who felt unconstrained by the bounds of matrimony might have been termed promiscuous, or worse. Adeline tells us that her mother Nora “ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice.” Nora did so by keeping company with men in the local tavern rather than her husband, who dies a quiet death while his wife is enjoying the attention of other men. None of Nora’s boyfriends want the burden of supporting a widow, so Nora is forced to take a job as a lighthouse keeper on a small rocky island near Boston.

For reasons of her own, Adeline stopped speaking after her father died. Her silence does not seem to trouble the island dwellers, some of whom she befriends. Eventually she gives advice and comfort to a married friend named Julie, who for some reason decides to confide in a mute twelve-year-old, perhaps because muteness assures that her secrets will not be revealed. In any event, the heart of the story concerns a conspiracy between Adeline and Julie, largely planned by Adeline, to save Julie from her abusive husband.

Alice Hoffman writes with quiet grace. The story ends in a satisfying way that instills warm feelings toward Adeline without relying on contrivances to manipulate the reader’s emotions — save perhaps for Adeline’s willful muteness, a character trait that is surprisingly unoriginal. In all other respects, however, I admire Hoffman’s restraint. “Everything My Mother Taught Me” does just enough to make its point — even a child can make and implement a life-altering decision, one that the child will intuitively know to be correct — without trying to do too much. I didn’t entirely buy Adeline’s silence or the setup, but I nevertheless enjoyed the story, and that’s what counts.

RECOMMENDED

Can You Feel This? by Julie Orringer

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Can You Feel This” is a mundane story about the anxieties of a new mother who, in childbirth, recalls a traumatic experience that she has hidden from her husband. Julie Orringer hints at the traumatic incident before it is revealed near the story’s end. Until then, the story’s focus is on childbirth, territory that has been explored in countless stories about the anxieties experienced by new mothers. Orringer does nothing new or special in this story’s examination of the fear of motherhood.

Emily is understandably freaked out about the bleeding that won’t stop. Recalling her doctor’s warnings, she fears losing her baby. As her husband Ky drives her across a bridge to Manhattan, she’s also freaked out because she sees a different bridge where her mother died 28 years earlier. Apparently, Emily has never become acclimated to traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan via a bridge.

Against her wishes, Ky takes her to the hospital where she saw her mother’s dead body. Emily feels very alone because she has no living parents, notwithstanding the presence of a patient husband who drove her to the hospital and stayed in her room during her C-section, as well as three friends who visit during her brief hospital stay. Emily is a bit fragile.

Doctors stick Emily with needles and repeatedly ask “Can you feel this?” Hence the title, which presumably also refers to all the other things the protagonist does or doesn’t feel. How very literary.

Since it happens quite early, it isn’t a spoiler to report that the baby is delivered alive and that he smells like wildflowers. Alyssum, in particular. Orringer goes on about new-baby scent for just a few sentences, but that’s a few sentences too long for my taste.

The bulk of the story explores Emily’s endless stream of anxieties: her reluctance to enter a state of motherhood because of her unhappy experience with her unstable mother; her attempts to figure out how to operate her newborn. Neither her husband (who stays dutifully in the background) nor her supportive visitors lessen her self-absorbed anguish. Why Emily insists on feeling sorry for herself in the midst of all this love and attention is a bit of a mystery. Emily seems to think she needs her long-dead mother to tell her how to raise a baby, a task that women have been doing forever, despite getting advice and instruction, not to mention helpful pamphlets, from hospital staff. If she needs coaching, she can also turn to another visitor, a “powerful” West Coast neuroscientist who is the mother of three children and one of Emily’s long-time friends. So why all the fuss?

The story works its way to a denouement after Emily leaves the hospital and must again confront a scary bridge, (presumably) symbolic of a bridge between pre-mommy life and her new-mommy status. In second-person prose that is (presumably) meant to connect the reader more closely to Emily, we learn the source of her life-shaping trauma. I rejected the traumatic moment as ridiculously manipulative and, in any event, I had little sympathy for Emily’s three-decade long refusal to confront her past. Nor was I moved by the suggestion that childbirth will finally give Emily reason to change.

Orringer’s prose is fluid. Emily is the only character who is given even the slightest substance (all that can be said of her husband is that he seems like a nice guy), although it isn’t unusual to shortchange secondary characters in short fiction. I found no offsetting virtues to overcome my dislike of a contrived motherhood story about an annoyingly fragile character. Readers who enjoy obvious emotional manipulation or, for that matter, stories about anxious new mommies will likely have a very different reaction.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Dawn by Selahattin Demirtaş

Published in Turkey in 2017; published in translation by Hogarth on April 23, 2019

Selahattin Demirtaş’ preface explains that he is a human rights lawyer and a dissident who is held in a Turkish prison. He wrote these stories while awaiting trial for acts of opposition to an authoritarian government that classified his speeches as criminal provocations. Americans who chant “lock her up” either have no idea or do not care that they want political opposition to be criminalized in the United States just is it is in the world’s most oppressive nations.

Demirtaş was a Turkish politician before (and even after) his arrest. The last story in this collection describes a utopian society that is presumably his vision for what Turkey can become. Many of the stories explain how far the nation is removed from that utopian vision.

In “The Man Inside,” a prisoner watching sparrows building a nest imagines them standing up to law enforcement sparrows that want them to tear the nest down. “Seher” tells of a girl who must keep her date with a man a secret, lest her father break her legs. When she is raped, she receives a punishment commanded by her father (in the name of defending the family’s “honor”) that is even worse. “The Mermaid” is about a woman who flees from Hama with her daughter and comes to an unfortunate end.

“Nazan the Cleaning Lady” is arrested after being injured by people fleeing tear gas that the police used to break up a demonstration. She imagines what kind of vehicles the people she meets drive based on their social status. “Greetings to Those Dark Eyes” considers the consequences of villages that promote child labor and child brides. One story is written in the form of a letter to the prison guards who read letters written by prisoners.

While the stories lack the complex subtlety that a more experienced writer might provide, the subject matter is inherently powerful. Demirtaş’ best story uses indirection to reinforce the impact of violence on innocent lives. “Kebab Halabi” is set in a marketplace where a man who is famed for his cheese-filled pastry künefe feels doomed love for a woman he cannot have, not realizing the woman is doomed to die at the hand of a suicide bomber. The emphasis on the normalcy of life with its simple joys and longings, contrasted with the sudden violence that rips those lives apart, makes the story memorable.

When Demirtaş departs from the theme of oppression, his stories are less successful. A story about a love triangle that does not end well is mundane. “As Lonely as History,” about a couple who learn a lesson about placing work and wealth ahead of love and family is pleasant but contrived. It is so obvious that it might be considered a parable rather than a literary story.

I could not find the point in “Asuman, Look What You’ve Done,” in which a bus driver tells a telenovela-type story to a young passenger and years later hires the passenger as his son’s lawyer. The stories of growing up told in “Settling Scores” also fail to impress.

The collection features one strong story and several stories that illustrate Turkey’s human rights violations. Collections like this are always an important reminder that authoritarian governments endure, and that free countries must always be vigilant to guard against leaders who mimic authoritarian rulers. I recommend it for the political stories; the others are less interesting.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Sing to It by Amy Hempel

Published by Scribner on March 26, 2019

Several of the stories in Sing to It are the shortest of short stories. Perhaps discerning readers will appreciate their depth of feeling or discern their hidden intent. Most of them left me cold. The title story, just a few sentences long, begins with “At the end, he said, No metaphors.” The story is, I guess, a metaphor, but not one that I grasped.

Amy Hempel’s style is to convey intense feelings using as few words as possible. That’ an admirable goal. When she uses too few words, however, I find myself missing all the rich flavor that she seems to have excised in order to get to the story’s core. I’m not sure that all of these stories are really stories at all, but I know that Hempel is popular in literary circles and that other readers are likely to disagree with me about the value of her brief glimpses of life.

As for the longer stories, I loved “A Full-Service Shelter,” which has the indirect storytelling feel of “The Things They Carried” in its heartbreaking description of how dogs perceived the volunteers at a humane society shelter. No dog lover could read the story without being moved.

The longest story, “Cloudland,” is told by a teacher who did cocaine with her students and moved to Florida to make a new life, although not the kind of life that depends on ambition. The protagonist has an abundance of random thoughts and memories and she isn’t shy about sharing them with the reader. Her most substantive memory is about giving up a child for adoption. “For safekeeping. For peace of mind.” Some of her current thoughts are fantasies about seeing or spending time with her daughter; others are about the emptiness she feels. In contrast with Hempel’s other stories, “Cloudland” might have been told more powerfully with fewer words.

The women in these stories are not living happy lives. The narrator of “The Chicane” tells the story of an an American woman who got pregnant by a French actor, then married a guy from Portugal and labored to turn him into an American after she got pregnant again. Neither relationship works out well for her. “Greed” is narrated by a destructive woman whose husband has an affair with an older woman. In “The Correct Grip,” a woman who was attacked by a man with a knife chats amiably with her attacker’s wife.

Only one of the stories in this collection appealed to me, so I cannot recommend the volume to readers who share my tastes. Your mileage may vary. Other than “A Full Service Shelter,” I was largely indifferent to the book’s contents. Even the stories with more substance, such as “Cloudland,” came across to me as pointless. Maybe pointlessness is the point, but it isn’t a point that makes me want to read story after story. The quality of Hempel’s prose, on the other hand, made the stories easy to read, even when I lost interest in the narrative.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

This Is Not a Love Song by Brendan Mathews

Published by Little, Brown and Company on February 5, 2019

The stories in the collection differ in style, but they all have substance. In “Heroes of the Revolution,” a writer from Sarajevo tours Chicago with a group of Eastern European journalists. When their bubbly tour guide wants the writer to open up about her life, she is unprepared for the story she hears, yet it feels familiar to one of the journalists. The experiences that two characters associate with apple orchards illustrate the vast differences in people’s lives, differences that prevent them from bonding despite their commonalities.

“This Is Not a Love Song” is a lengthy character sketch of a singer named Kat who became a bit famous before she died, as sketched by her photographer, a former roommate and friend who seems to have been obsessed with her. “My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer” is told from the perspective of a jealous circus clown who falls in love with a trapeze artist. The setting suggests a less serious story than the others, but the themes (working without a net as a metaphor for life) are just as somber as those advanced in the other entries.

“Salvage” describes a man who earns cash to tear apart buildings in the decaying Midwest to salvage treasure for his boss. Faced with a father who wants him to “man up,” a boss who abuses him, and the unattainability of his dreams, the man hits bottom before realizing that the treasure he needs to salvage is his life.

Many of the stories are about families and relationships. “How Long Does the First Part Last?” recounts a guy’s thoughts during a lengthy drive, memories of the past and glimpses of the future, all beginning when he hears “Can we not talk?” as the prelude to a long, silent trip. Another story set in a car, “The Drive,” is about the generation gap between dads and the girls they drive home.

Dan is sure the house has toxic mold, Jenna is sure it doesn’t. It is the marriage in “Airborne” that has become toxic. Told largely from Jenna’s perspective, the story is one of uncertainty and growing fears about choices she has made, all leading to an abrupt and entirely unexpected ending.

“Henry and His Brother” is told in alternating sections, one narrated by Harry and the other by his brother. The story is interesting for the differing perspectives of two brothers who love each other but need to find a way to accept each other. If they both agree on one thing, it is probably this: “It’s the years invested in loving another person, or trying to love them as best you can, that can turn your heart to stone and drag you down, deeper than you ever thought you could go.” As for the brothers, maybe “keeping each other close is the only way to keep pressure on the wound.”

“Dunn & Sons” closely examines three brothers and their father. The narrative voice belongs to the son of one of the brothers who is home from the Army but, feeling now like an outsider, isn’t likely to join the family business. The males in the family give ownership rights to a family story based on who tells it best, but they have never learned to talk to each other. The tension that builds during a family golf outing is palpable. The spotlight illuminating the difference between family stories and family communication makes “Dunn & Sons” my second favorite story in the volume.

Dugan is from Chicago but moved to Durham to further a romance that burned out.  While taking pictures for a photography class, Dugan accidentally burns down a black church. When another church burns, Dugan wonders whether he inadvertently inspired an arsonist, perhaps someone he knows. “Look at Everything,” my favorite story in the collection, explores Dugan’s sense of guilt as he asks himself why he took picture after picture as the church burned.

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