Post-feminist blues Daphne Kalotay’s gendered prose BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Calamity and Other Stories By Daphne Kalotay. Doubleday, 208 pages, $19.95.

"It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex," wrote Virginia Woolf. "It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly." An author must possess both sexes in his or her head, Woolf argues. Daphne Kalotay, in her debut collection of quiet short stories, has only one. In Calamity and Other Stories, the Brookline-based author writes in a voice that feels exclusively female. One might argue that we’ve reached a point where an author — particularly a female author — can ignore the opposite sex and write in a way that is unabashedly feminine, that women no longer have to prove they can run the same rivers as men by blurring the sexes in their brains or in their narrative voice on the page. Perhaps now, almost 80 years since Woolf made her case in A Room of One’s Own, writing as a woman pure and simple is enough. In some of the stories in Calamity, it is. Others feel unfertilized.

In "All Life’s Grandeur," for example, Geoff looks back to the summer he was 13, when his dad starts shacking up with a new woman, when his only friend in vacationland is an 11-year-old girl named Valerie. Kalotay is at first unconvincing as a boy. Talk of "boisterous erections" and Playboy, the way Geoff’s voice has dropped octaves and the hair on his legs keeps growing, is not enough to achieve true boyishness. So the story feels neuter. But "Grandeur" does boast one of the most wrenching moments in the collection. In a classic adolescent stunt, Geoff and Valerie make a prank call. They grab a business card from a raffle pot and call a woman and pretend she’s won the thousand-dollar prize. "For once I can finally go on vacation!" says the woman. She asks if they can wait half an hour to drop off the check; she needs time to do her hair. Geoff’s response is true to his age. "I felt my heart drop the way it had the night my mom found out about Dad and Shirley. . . . I’d known something was wrong, just as I did right now." His guilt is sour and palpable; he glimpses the vulnerability of adults without quite knowing that’s what he’s witnessing.

Kalotay knits the same set of characters through the collection at various stages of their lives. Geoff shows up again as a high-school senior in "Prom Season," as a twentysomething dealing with a temperamental house and girlfriend in "Snapshots," and on his way to be the best man in his pal Mack’s wedding in "Rehearsal Dinner," one of the finest stories in the collection for its humor and optimism. The more successful Geoff stories — like "Rehearsal Dinner" — are told in third person rather than first.

We encounter Rhea, the collection’s primary figure, as a young girl who catches her tipsy mom kiss another woman at a summer dinner party in "Serenade," again as a lonely 28-year-old getting over a break-up in "The Man from Allston Electric," in Italy doing research and visiting with two Italian brothers in "Difficult Thoughts," and in "Calamity" and "Wedding at Rockport" as a disheveled maid of honor. Throughout, she’s a complicated mix of tough-minded academic and needy female. In "Calamity," on a malfunctioning airplane, she exchanges regrets with the old woman sitting next to her: "I’ve spent so much time and effort on trying to dress the right way, trying to say the appropriate things. Trying to fit in rather than be the person who accomplishes anything." The old woman responds, "In other words, you regret having been a woman." Yes, Rhea admits, "I regret not having been a man in this world." She, like Kalotay, is all woman. And at first, it feels like a betrayal of the sex (why isn’t she proud to be a woman?), but it’s also a liberating realization. Dressing right and fitting in — existing for other people — is not enough. In Kalotay’s muddled post-feminist vision, the ’60s’ "I am woman, hear me roar" has been replaced with "I am woman and it still sucks."

Kalotay acknowledges an earlier generation of feminism through Annie and Eileen, old friends who surface together and apart in the stories. In the face of death, divorce, and disease, both maintain their strength and their perspective. Annie, as a svelte, confident 40-year-old, beds her ex-husband in a frank and upbeat way. Eileen, mother to Mack, whose life is "all soft corners and cushy sofas," knows that her son needs a woman to push him. Rhea has pushed too much. Mack marries instead her old neighborhood friend Callie, who oozes "easy confidence." As a guest at their wedding, Annie asks, "She’s taking Mack’s name?", then sighs, "After everything we fought for."

Despite the feminist currents that run through the book, the stories in which a woman is the main character feel leaden compared with those that focus on men. "Difficult Thoughts," the one about Rhea in Italy, has no tension; it’s soft and forgettable. Even if her portrayal of maleness isn’t always convincing, when Kalotay inhabits the perspective of a male — as she does in "Grandeur," "Rehearsal Dinner," "Snapshots," "Prom Season," and "Sunshine Cleaners" — she engages in that internal male-female interplay. Writing as woman-manly, she proves Woolf right.

Daphne Kalotay reads from Calamity and Other Stories tonight, January 27, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner; call (617) 566-6660. Then on Wednesday February 2 at 7 p.m., she’s at the Boston University Barnes & Noble, 660 Beacon Street in Kenmore Square; call (617) 236-7448. And on Thursday February 10 at 7:30 p.m., she’s at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619.