What does it mean to be a contemporary master of the short story? To be a writer’s writer? Edith Pearlman is described as both, often and rightfully. On her website, she offers one possible answer: “I am slow,” she says. “A sentence often takes an hour to compose before I throw it out. What can you do?”
This self-described, turtle-paced perfectionism comes as no surprise, as every page of her new collection, “Honeydew,” seems saturated with painstaking attention to craft.
So to judge by Pearlman’s exquisite work, several traits can make one a writer’s writer, including authoritative narration and deft manipulation of time. These — to use a frequently applied adjective — masterful techniques permit Pearlman to execute grand changes in distance and to make leaps in chronology without having to explain her way out of them. So, too, do they allow her to make sweeping pronouncements (“Happiness lengthens time,” for instance, and “all humans look pretty much alike”) without having to get bogged down in backing them up.
Such narrative judgment and authority are a pleasure to be in the presence of. In the story “Stone,” of the protagonist who has moved south from New York City to “a flat town” to live with her extended family, Pearlman writes, “She wasn’t much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companionship, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool.” These are only the third and fourth sentences of the story, so we, the readers, would have no way of making that critique ourselves, but Pearlman gets us to believe her narrator and to want to know why this woman will prove so foolish.
Another trait worth noting that can render one a writer’s writer is choosing, as Pearlman has, to work exclusively in a form with limited commercial viability and opportunity for fame. Pearlman is a septuagenarian, and this mention of her age serves to emphasize the point that she’s been putting in the work — beautiful work — for years and is only relatively recently starting to get her due, perhaps, as some have speculated, because she’s never written a novel (think Alice Munro, think Jorge Luis Borges). Prior to “Honeydew,” her most recent book, “Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories,” included work from the previous four decades and won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
This newest book contains 20 stories in fewer than 300 pages, and even the shortest among them convey a depth and a texture well out of proportion to what their word counts might suggest them capable of. This sense of magnitude-within-concision is in part because of Pearlman’s skill at characterization. Story after story, she conveys not only how a character is behaving in the story’s present, but also their past and their possible future. In “Tenderfoot,” for instance, Bobby, an art history professor newly moved to town, notes that one of his students reminds him of the wife from whom he is separated: “knowledgeable on the outside, unsure on the inside.” Later, after having his feet exfoliated during the first pedicure of his life, “He marveled at this exuda like a small boy proud of his poop.”
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In each story, Pearlman quietly but firmly illustrates her straightforward and unceremonious way not just with time, but also with place, writing convincingly of such diverse settings as “a private day school for girls” to “a soup kitchen for women and their children” to a cruise ship called The Golden Swan to the meetings of “the Society Against Female Mutilation.” The story “Castle 4” takes the fairy tale potential of a hospital setting and uses it to brilliant effect, shifting among the main characters who cluster in and around the fortress-like edifice to tell a story that is its own modern fairy tale. The omniscient narrator here, as elsewhere, is able to ratchet up close for minute detail — two children reading anatomy books are looking at tumors, “some like sacks of vermicelli” — and then way back out again, even to abstraction, from microscopic to panoramic.
Although some of the stories take place in the same setting, Godolphin, Mass., and have overlapping characters, what unites them more than place or any over-arching plot is the sensibility: specific yet universal. It’s a lovely paradox: magical yet concrete.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author, most recently, of the novel “O, Democracy!”
“Honeydew”
By Edith Pearlman, Little, Brown, 279 pages, $25