Divorce and the chance to start over come into play, as well, in the searing “Her Firstborn.” Dean and Lise are enrolled in a birthing class whose instructor encourages intimate confessions. In the first session, Dean sits in torment as he prepares for Lise to reveal the unspeakable with the group: During her first marriage, her baby died at 5 months. After sharing, Packer captures the stunned silence: “There are no more questions, no more answers, just the sound of the clock ticking and the feel of a group of people waiting for something to be over.” What haunts Dean is that he can never fully understand what his wife has gone through; he has glimpsed enough to know that there will always be a gulf between them — a gulf of despair. Will their baby be okay? Will having their baby help Lise let go of her grief? Packer makes those questions feel so urgent that it’s tempting to race ahead for the answers, or relief.
Packer’s themes flow naturally from one story to the next, giving the collection a smart and compelling cohesion. In “Molten,” Kathryn mourns the loss of her teenage son; Ben was killed while saving a child from an oncoming train, and since that tragedy, his mother has clung to his spirit by secretly listening to his CD collection. Here Packer uses the story to open the lid on class resentment. Kathryn takes no comfort from a letter the child’s mother has written: “When he is old enough we will tell Tyler that he owes his life to a hero.” She burns with the conviction that if the boy’s mother had been paying better attention, Ben would still be in his room, listening to music. Eventually, Kathryn drives over to the family’s house. “On the other side she passed the car wash. The other side of the tracks — it wasn’t lost on her. Smaller houses, smaller yards. . . . If they had tiny yards they were going to wander away, weren’t they?”
Those low-lying hostilities show up again in the wonderful, darkly comic “Jump.” Carolee, an unhappy shift manager at Copy Copy, has car trouble and reluctantly accepts the help of a co-worker, Alejandro, who “was thin like a teenager, with skinny shoulders and skinny legs and no butt.” Carolee’s misfortune feels particularly frustrating because her life is so rudderless. “He basically was a kid: twenty-two at the most, whereas she’d turn thirty in less than a month, and what a good time that was going to be.”
“Jump” is also infused with a building sense of unease. Are Alejandro’s intentions reliable? The more time he and Carolee spend together, the more we luxuriate in Packer’s comic gifts.
Packer dazzles less with a particular sentence than with a paragraph or a page, as she captures an insight or mood. Her stories brim with piercing vitality and clear-eyed believability, so it’s a shame that the opening novella ultimately stumbles. “Walk for Mankind,” which begins in 1972 in Stanford, Calif., revolves around the friendship between eighth-graders Sasha and Richard. Their relationship is innocent until they encounter a charismatic, 20-something drug dealer named Cal. When Cal says to Sasha, “Beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” we know too quickly that the period of innocence is coming to an end. And that’s where the story’s pleasures start to fall away, as well. With Richard shuttling back and forth between his unhappy, separated parents, “Walk for Mankind” is planted in very familiar territory, but you keep thinking that a clever twist lies just around the bend. Instead, the story plods along with too little to break up the protagonists’ increasingly tedious on-again, off-again relationship. Packer does a laudable job of narrating the story from Richard’s point of view, but in the end there’s too much predictability and too little emotional payoff for the novella’s nearly 100 pages.
After that, though, the water is very fine. In fact, it’s exhilarating.
Rowell is deputy editor of The Post Sunday Magazine.
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