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"Roxana Robinson's beautifully rendered prose captures moments of domestic drama - sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic, always heartrending and illuminating."
- Joyce Carol Oates
A PERFECT STRANGER and Other Stories
Robinson's third collection proves her a master of the short story (she has also written three novels, including 2003's Sweetwater). Her finely tuned realism, as well as her settings and characters New York, its bedroom communities, the Eastern seaboard and the comfortable upper-middle-class living there recall Cheever and Updike... Robinson approaches the huge misunderstandings of family life from many angles and anything but timidly. In "Family Christmas," a child confronted with adult mysteries says, "I knew that this language I was trying to learn could not be learned directly, that it was something that had to be absorbed blindly and obliquely.... We would have to learn it through signs, inflections, looks and sighs and tones of voice." Robinson is unusually good with the "strange foreign tongue" of the elderly: the aristocratic grandparents of "Family Christmas"; the dogged, long-married battlers of "Assistance"; the malevolent Santa Fe misanthrope of "Shame"; the befuddled British visitor of the title story. Even the younger couples in the only linked stories, "Choosing Sides" and "Assez," are grandparents, and what they say about grandparenthood is arresting. But the collection's most affecting stories touch on the chasm between parents and children, husbands and wives. Robinson's ear is wonderful, her graceful prose a real pleasure.
- Publisher's Weekly, starred review
Thirteen splendid stories in an elegant third collection from Robinson (Sweetwater, 2003, etc.) range widely to give us a peek into the obsessions and troubles of the well-versed and well-off.
The title story inserts a British opera expert into the suburban guestroom of a volunteer for a local music festival. The hostess is so eager to please the festival head that she doesn't bother to ask her husband if he would mind a "perfect stranger" as a houseguest for the weekend. By the end of this deft tale, Robinson has captured all three characters beautifully, along with the shifting nuances of marriage. "The Treatment" begins bluntly ("Here is what I do each morning") and proceeds to describe in suspenseful detail the horrors and hopes of a woman who takes a "chilled golden globe" from the refrigerator each morning, warming up a powerful antibiotic she must feed into a plastic tube inserted into her bloodstream, in hopes it will cure her of a long-term disease. The narrator of "The Football Game" compares her own artist father and progressive mother unfavorably to her boarding school roommate's family ("Their family seemed to unwind, like a spool, into a perfectly woven fabric . . . "). By the end of the Yale-Bowdoin game, where the two girls keep her parents waiting while they dally with two Yalies, she has learned that the world outside her family was much larger than she had imagined, and more complicated "more dangerous and beautiful." "The Face Lift" follows the years-long trajectory of a friendship between former classmates, one a Pennsylvania country girl, the other a wealthy, seemingly carefree Salvadoran. The narrator, divorced and childless, seems to envy Cristina's wealth, her marriage, her children, until she learns of a violent incident in San Salvador that almost cost Cristina her life.
Stories that tick away with the precision of perfectly wrought timepieces
- Kirkus Review, starred review
May 8, 2005
Genteel Rebellions
By Bliss Broyard
A PERFECT STRANGER
And Other Stories.
By Roxana Robinson.
235 pp. Random House. $23.95.
THE editors of an influential British anthology recently set off a debate in the pages of The Guardian that spread through the literary blogosphere. In their introduction to ''New Writing 13,'' Toby Litt and Ali Smith remarked that ''on the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic . . . as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell.'' Trying to subdue the ensuing firestorm, Litt and Smith later argued that they didn't object to domestic subjects per se but to ''the lack of risk-taking in the writing itself.'' (Back in 1998, in Harper's Magazine, Francine Prose addressed a similar perception of American women writers.)
The 13 stories in Roxana Robinson's new collection -- which explore relationships between people, usually family members, without benefit of flip-book-style illustrations, footnotes or other daredevilry of fashionable form -- brand her as just the type of woman writer the editors of ''New Writing 13'' might hastily dismiss as ''disappointingly domestic.'' And that would be a loss, because the best stories in ''A Perfect Stranger'' illuminate those sudden, mysterious internal shifts that allow us to feel forgiveness or the weight of our errors, that alchemize envy into admiration, shame into triumph, that carry us across the spectrum of human experience in a single moment even as they remind us of the fecundity of everyday life.
Robinson manages this feat by paying close attention to the nuances that reveal people's interior lives, a trait that she often bestows on her characters. The narrator of ''Family Christmas,'' recalling her childhood attempts to understand her parents' conversation and, by extension, the adult world, recognizes that this information ''had to be absorbed'' through ''signs, inflections, looks and sighs and tones of voice.''+When the husband of her grandparents' cook drunkenly confronts her ''Grandpère,'' the narrator intuits more about the scene than she realizes: ''Part of what I felt was shame. . . . Shame for other people's misery, shame that it had lain naked and exposed before us, shame that we'd seen it.'' By having the child, not the adults, register this truth, Robinson suggests that we can become less perceptive as we grow older, through our willful inurement to life's inequities and despair.
Robinson, who is also the author of three novels, two previous story collections and a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, is particularly good at charting the ebb and flow of affection and fury within relationships. In the title story, a husband and wife privately feud while playing host to an opera scholar for the weekend. Jeffrey, whose wife, Martha, agreed to put up this ''perfect stranger'' without consulting him, ''felt ill used, and also rather noble, for rising so well to the occasion.'' In the kitchen, he reassures their guest that having him stay is ''our pleasure,'' while in the privacy of his bathroom he slams the lid of the laundry hamper in a petulant display. For her part, Martha is too concerned with impressing the local music festival's lectures committee to acknowledge her part in her husband's passive-aggressive behavior. But when an emergency -- their keys locked in the car -- forces them back into solidarity, Martha recognizes the fluctuations that characterize, even strengthen, their marriage: ''They were in this, whatever it was, together, both of them struggling with the waves of emotion, both carrying burdens of anger and love.''
In the genteel orbit of Robinson's stories, people fight against being ''hemmed in by a jostling throng of rules and expectations'' and try to overcome a brooding disenchantment with their lives. Occasionally, you can feel the author's hand too firmly on her characters' backs, pushing them toward tidy resolutions. In the first pages of ''The Football Game,'' the teenage narrator's unmitigated admiration for her roommate's parents -- whose pastimes of tailgating, martini drinking and garden club meetings seem reassuringly normal, compared with those of her shaggy-haired, Abstract-Expressionist painter father and bohemian-styled yet oddly prim mother -- telegraph an imminent reversal of positions. More often, though, Robinson remains in the background, quietly allowing her meticulous observations to convey the quotidian in all its perfect strangeness.
- New York Times
BY CAROLE GOLDBERG
A PERFECT STRANGER AND OTHER STORIES.
Roxana Robinson. Random. 235 pages. $23.95.
Roxana Robinson often writes about the privileged, and one of her strengths is evoking sympathy for people who seem to have every advantage yet suffer nonetheless. She visits this territory again in a fine collection of short stories that explores with delicacy, wit and a good deal of empathy the angst that afflicts the comfortable.
Robinson is particularly adept at writing about women who have grown up cosseted as well as constricted by their belief that life has rules that ought to be obeyed, even as they see others thrive -- or seem to -- by breaking free.
In the first of the collection's 13 stories, Family Christmas, a young girl visiting her wealthy grandparents witnesses a shouting match between her proper grandfather and the crude husband of the beloved family housekeeper, an encounter the child knows is important, although she cannot say why. She is clear on one point: some things are not meant to be discussed: ''You had to be careful in talking to grown-ups, it was like talking to foreigners. . . . I waited for the next thing that would happen, for the grown-ups to take charge again. I didn't understand these things, and I knew that no one would explain them to me.''
The confused girl reappears in various guises as an adult, still trying to understand how the world really works. In The Face-Lift, she's the staid former roommate of a fabulously rich, spoiled woman from San Salvador who has flouted almost every rule, yet remains for the narrator a wild alter ego to be admired and forgiven her many trespasses. Similarly, in Choosing Sides, an American woman caught up in her son's troubles and at odds with her husband finds succor from a free-thinking friend in France, a woman she calls ''la jumelle'' -- her twin.
Several of the stories are set in France, in this book a land where the emotions that must be restrained at home can be indulged. Pilgrimageis one of the Paris stories, and easily the book's most humorous. Here a woman falls head over heels but not for a man. It's a shop that infatuates her, and like most enchantments, it ends with a rude awakening.
Funny in a sardonic, sad way is Assistance, in which the grown daughter of an elderly couple almost crippled by their crotchety ways becomes exasperatingly tangled in their rapidly devolving life.
Several stories are marred by their too-neat endings, didactic summings-up that offer moral lessons an astute reader already understands. But others are subtler and all the more powerful for it. At the Beachexplores, from a husband's point of view, the sheer awfulness of a quarrel that almost derails a marriage. It is written with impressive economy.
The most haunting of all is The Treatment, a tale of a woman who must infuse herself daily with an antibiotic to combat a long-standing illness. The description of the process -- a sort of holy medicinal sacrament that the woman believes means salvation -- is stunningly written and vividly sensual. But Robinson takes it further, introducing a visiting nurse who is, if not quite the Angel of Death, then certainly an Angel of Disillusionment who makes no attempt to comfort the afflicted.
A Perfect Strangeris a strong collection from a writer who knows that within each adult forever resides that bewildered child, still seeking to understand what the grown-ups are talking about, still making his or her way in an eternally foreign land.
Carole Goldberg reviewed this book for The Hartford Courant.