Terse tales

Three masters of the short story talk about their craft

by Johnette Rodriguez

Reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated -- the short story is back in full force. One only has to look at the fact that three of the seven fiction writers coming to Brown University Bookstore this week are award-winning short short story writers: Hester Kaplan won the 1999 Flannery O'Connor Award for The Edge of Marriage (University of Georgia Press); Jhumpa Lahiri was named one of The New Yorker's 20 Voices for the 21st Century and included in the 1999 O. Henry short story collection for Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin); and Nancy Reisman won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award for House Fires (University of Iowa Press).

Each of the three also has a Rhode Island connection: Kaplan has lived in Providence for the past 10 years with her husband Michael Stein, M.D., who heads the HIV program at Rhode Island Hospital; Lahiri grew up in Kingston, where her parents still reside; and Reisman taught at the Rhode Island School of Design for five years in the '90s. Reisman and Kaplan were members together of the Providence Area Writers Group; Reisman and Lahiri were writing fellows together at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in '97.

THE EDGE OF MARRIAGE is an appropriate title for Hester Kaplan's book, since each of the nine compelling, emotionally intense stories therein looks at the internal workings of committed relationships, how they pull apart, how they stay together, what makes them tick from moment to moment.

"These stories express great faith in the love between two people, even though it's frightening and not always satisfying," noted Kaplan, in a phone conversation from the East Side home she shares with her writer husband (see sidebar) and their two young sons. "In most of these, the intense and lifelong attachments people make are the most important thing in their lives -- not their jobs, not what they've produced."

Most of the characters in Kaplan's stories are in the generation ahead of her: parents reacting to the return of their grown children; couples coping with a mate's age-related disability; one partner incorporating a friend of the other into the circle of their relationship; a husband watching his wife grieve for her best friend dead of cancer; a wife coming to terms with her husband's infidelity and the its enduring consequences.

"If I write about people my age, especially women, then I feel like I'm writing about me," Kaplan remarked. "I see these stories as quite poignant situations, whereas with people my age the situations are more immediate."

Kaplan grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- her parents are biographer Justin Kaplan and novelist Anne Bernays -- and she has lived in Providence for the past 10 years. She's worked at university presses and magazines; she's done ghost-writing and writing for lay medical texts.

Kaplan was inspired to write the last story in the collection, "Live Life King-Sized," by an ad for a resort that sounded like such an idyllic spot, she began to wonder, "What's the worst thing that can happen in Paradise?" The protagonist, Kip, grew up on this island and is determined to make the resort business that his mother started a success. When a fifty-something couple arrives, and the husband's illness drives his other customers away, he is given an unexpected chance to see what love and commitment are really about. This story has a more complex plot than the others, but each of Kaplan's stories has captivating twists and turns and hard-hitting characterizations.

Kaplan's next book, a novel titled The Altruist, will be coming out sometime in the next 18 months.

THE TITLE STORY of Jhumpa Lahiri's engrossing collection, Interpreter of Maladies, is told from the perspective of a man who is good at languages and drives tourists to India out into the countryside to view the sights. He also works as an interpreter for a doctor who has many Gujarati patients but does not speak their language. This driver/interpreter, Mr. Kapasi, has an Indian/ American family of five on this trip, and the wife and mother, Mrs. Das, confesses a secret to him and asks for a remedy to heal her heart about it. But Mr. Kapasi has his own secrets, as do many of Lahiri's characters.

"The stories are very much about suffering and communication between people, between cultures and within relationships," Lahiri commented, in a phone conversation from her New York apartment. "I see the title as the need to voice human pain and longing to other and to themselves."

Lahiri, who came to Rhode Island when she was three, draws on observations of her parents' lives to write about the immigrant experience in several of the stories "It's very much a reflection of being the child of immigrants." Her first language was Bengali, which she always spoke at home. Her parents, who had come to the U.S. from Calcutta by way of England, read Bengali newspapers, played Indian music, cooked Indian food and had Bengali friends.

"But I learned very early on that people at school and elsewhere didn't take an interest in that part of me," Lahiri remembered. "It wasn't something I felt proud of, as a young child, or something I boasted about."

But that Bengali culture, including trips to India with her parents and younger sister while growing up, forms a rich background to many of Lahiri's stories and subtly informs the reader about different customs and traditions. The clash of Indian and American cultures takes on a humorous edge in "This Blessed House," in which a young couple uncover Christian icons in unexpected places in an old house they have bought. In that story and in another about a newly-married couple,"A Temporary Matter," Lahiri taps a well of tenderness that surrounds the sadness and struggle within relationships.

Responding to the restrictions and challenges of the short story form, Lahiri saw the writing of them as "almost mathematical, like solving a puzzle." She's been writing since elementary school but got more serious about it after she graduated from Barnard. She's currently at work on a novel.

HOUSE FIRES, Nancy Reisman's debut collection of 11 stories, is divided into four sections: the title story, "Buffalo Series," "Northeast Corridor," and "Jessie Stories." In all of them, Reisman is looking at, in her own words, "family connection and separation and the difficulties, the persistence and sometimes the failure of love."

Reisman herself grew up in Buffalo in a Jewish family, and after she wrote "Edie in Winter," about a shy, awkward unmarried sister who is repeatedly disappointed in love, she realized there were many other lives that intersected Edie's that she wanted to explore. But she preferred the limited structure of the short story to the expansiveness of a novel. Within a series of stories, Reisman was able to radically shift time and points of view and give the reader completely different snapshots of all the characters.

In "House Fires" itself, the main character, Amy, is coming to terms with the death, in a house fire, of her older sister Randi. As she watches herself and her parents interact, she becomes more and more interested in how the scenes between them would be framed or edited if she were trying to convey the experience in a film. This detachment helps her reach a point where she can make a decision about how she must move on and survive this loss.

"There's a lot in these stories about mothers, about parent-child relationships," Reisman reflected during a phone conversation from Provincetown, where she is pursuing a second-year fellowship, on a leave of absence from teaching at the University of Florida. "They also look at the way in which adults reach out to parent each other."

That is particularly true in the third Jessie story that concludes the collection, called "The Good Life." It's a rich, complex story, as conflicts from three generations swirl around Elaine, who is juggling frequent visits to her mother Sadie, in a nursing home, requests for help from her elderly Uncle Irv and negotiations with her recently-out daughter Jessie, who wants to bring her girlfriend Stephanie home to meet the family.

"The characters in my stories don't always make the best choices," Reisman explained. "Elaine's difficulties in dealing with her daughter's lesbianism, for example -- she makes gestures that people make that are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes appalling."

Reisman is currently at work on a novel that focuses on the early lives of Sadie and Uncle Irv. n

Authors, authors!

These scribes will be at the Brown Bookstore this week.

October 1 at 2 p.m., Sena Jeter Naslund reads from her novel Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer (William Morrow), a picaresque account inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick. Well-grounded in the history, society and personalities of the time she describes, Naslund has written an epic adventure tale with a woman in the spotlight.

October 1 at 4 p.m., Michael Stein, M.D. reads from his second novel, The White Life (Permanent Press), which looks at the emotional complexities underlying any patient-doctor relationship. In this case a doctor working with an older patient is reminded of the death of his own father. He teaches in the Medical Program at Brown.

October 1 at 4 p.m., Hester Kaplan.

October 1 at 6:30 p.m., Dava Sobel reads from Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love (Walker & Co.), a biography that incorporates surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, translated into English by Sobel. Author of the the 1995 best-seller Longitude.

October 2 at noon, Ron Chernow reads from his biography Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller (Random House). With access to Rockefeller's private papers, Chernow portrays both robber baron and philanthropist in elegant prose that captured the National Book Award for his previous biography, The House of Morgan.

October 2 at 4 p.m., Chang-rae Lee reads from his second novel, A Gesture Life (Riverhead Books), which is told through the eyes of Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth who has lived in Westchester for 30 years, with little emotional content to his life, only gestures. Lee won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first novel, Native Speaker.

October 4 at 4 p.m., Nancy Reisman.

October 4 at 5:30 p.m., Jhumpa Lahiri. (Lahiri will also sign books on October 5 at 7 p.m. at Waldenbooks in Wakefield.)

October 5 at 4 p.m., Brown grad Samantha Gillison reads from her debut novel, The Undiscovered Country (Henry Holt), set in the jungle of Papua New Guinea, where researcher Peter Campbell has gone to collect data and have his family learn about another culture. They end up learning more about themselves than the world around them.