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Flawed
characters who are just like us
By Miriam Wolf. Miriam Wolf is a San Francisco-based writer
working on a book about babies and sleep
Published
June 30, 2002
Some of Her
Friends That Year
By Maxine Chernoff
Coffee House, 312
pages, $16.95 paper
Filled with silences and miscommunications and,
all too often, heartbreak, contemporary relationships are -- to put it
mildly -- difficult. That's why we need poets and storytellers more than
ever. It's through stories that we begin to unravel the confusion and
soothe the hurts that modern relationships bring on.
And one of our
best explicators is Maxine Chernoff. For decades her fiction and poetry
have explored how people come together and how they break apart. In her
stories the characters either seem connected by gossamer strands that
rupture under the slightest touch or their bonds are so tight that they
cut off the flow of blood.
In her newest collection, "Some of Her
Friends That Year," Chernoff continues her investigation into the human
condition with 15 new short stories plus selected stories from the earlier
collections "Bop" and "Signs of Devotion." Together, these 40 stories form
a terrific overview of Chernoff's work.
The mostly female
protagonists of these new stories aren't girls anymore. They face a
different set of challenges than do young women. These women are reaching
down into themselves to find reserves. Like Tammy, the wife of a newly
minted author in "Onto the Past." Tammy's husband, Bryce, has become
famous through his memoirs--about his bedwetting, his stepfather's
cross-dressing and the accusations of sexual harassment that cost him his
job. Tammy has questions about their relationship:
"[T]he new Bryce
had become a danger to herself and others, first with his behavior and
then with his word processor. Who wants to be known as the wife of a
bedwetting, woman-harassing, son of a cross-dresser? . . . This was his
excuse for not getting a day job?"
Meanwhile, Bryce, on his book
tour, has some questions of his own. "Did any women in Ohio wear
underwear?" he wonders.
In fact, cheating, wandering men play a big
part in many of these stories. In "Satchmo," Sylvie's husband is having an
affair, and she develops some unusual coping methods. She spends her time
coming up with ideas for children's books ("Charlotte the Harlot," "Ethnic
Cleansing for Children") and develops a compulsive need to snort,
"Humph!"
Told in just a few pages, these stories have the gift of
economy. Chernoff uses language so skillfully that whole lives are
conveyed in just a few well-deployed sentences. In the moving title story,
Chernoff borrows a postmodern technique and uses a set of numbered
paragraphs to tell the story of a writer's friends:
"VII. One left
her husband of many years after finding him snorting cocaine with a junior
partner. . . .
"XI. One friend's cancer came back. . .
.
"XII. One had her first baby at forty-nine. . . .
"
Paragraph XIII gets to the heart of the matter: "Her teenage
daughter stayed depressed that year, and she thought of ways to help her."
Despite the unconventional format, this story feels satisfying and
well-rounded.
Chernoff reaches back into childhood for a couple of
terrific stories about young girls growing up in 1950s-era
Chicago.
"Jewish Urban White Trash Story" chronicles a girl's
hair-raising coming of age. She undresses in front of her open blinds
while a neighbor watches; she steals her grandmother's pills and glues
them to a barette; she is fondled while on a trip to the Wisconsin Dells
with the Girl Scouts. But one night she knees "the cutest boy in the
eighth grade" in the crotch, and you realize she is learning to take care
of herself.
In "The Untouchables," a reprint from "Signs of
Devotion," Chernoff brings a beautifully subtle sensibility to the story
of 12-year-old Jane and her budding friendship with Ike, the crop-haired
female attendant at her local gas station. Both have their problems--an
overprotective mother, a failed romance--but their friendship helps them
each see the larger world.
Alternately hopeful and harrowing,
Chernoff's short fiction is acutely drawn. She ferrets out the secrets
that her characters harbor and exposes them for all to see. She even
elegantly skewers whole states ("All the Buddhists were getting divorced
that spring. . . . Maybe that's why Diane hated California.").
But
Chernoff also tempers her sharp observations with plenty of humanity and
compassion. These characters are flawed and hurting, she seems to say, but
so are we all.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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