Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman

 

My mom and I read the Best American Short Stories edition from 2006 together this year. While they were all excellent, one called "Self-Reliance" stood out. It was by an author neither of us had read before: Edith Pearlman. In this exquisitely nuanced story, a woman faces death head on. It is the gorgeous kind of story my mother felt compelled to share among our family like a particularly virulent cold. 

It was so good we had to read more, so the rest of the year we've spent reading Pearlman's short story collection Binocular Vision, indulging ourselves with one or two stories a week like literary bon bons. Each story is unique, holding within it some nugget of surprise. Another surprise: There's only one available copy in the MLC and it lives right here in Ferguson. 

Pearlman is an observer and fabricator of human interiors. Her focus is contained: Individuals living mostly quiet, regular lives. Sure, there's an attempted kidnapping, but generally nothing very splashy occurs outside of a little incest, shoplifting seniors, and extramarital affairs (both consummated and not). How do people live? What choices make a life, and importantly, how do we relate to other people? How can you explain the fire that billows up from a spark between two strangers? These are the questions she keeps asking. 

There is frequently a tension between the comfort of self-reliance with its imagined security, and the complicated, unexpected messiness of bonding. "How satisfying domestic life was," thinks a retired bachelor, "When you could shut the door on it at the end of the evening and cross the hall and then shut a second door, your own." 

A nanny with a past agrees: "What she wanted [...] was a life alone, with a family at fingertip distance." Not necessarily her family, but a family. Pearlman depicts plenty of loving biological families but also the beauty of "chosen family." The people we're drawn to don't always make sense: the aforementioned bachelor and a fierce teen immigrant; a bureaucrat and an artist; an innkeeper and a diplomat's child. 

Regardless of how they bond, Pearlman's characters are united by their need for connection.

-Michael G.