The Shortlist I KNOW YOU KNOW WHO I AMStoriesBy Peter Kispert226 pp. Penguin. Paper, $16. The 21 stories in “I Know You Know Who I Am” contain countless liars, all intent on portraying themselves in the way they feel they should be seen.
Many of these characters are the types often relegated to the role of best friend: underdogs, men forced to play wingman to their more beautiful and dopey companions. But Kispert’s collection allows them the spotlight, and watching them star in their own life stories is both squirm-worthy and riveting. They speak recklessly and lose control of their lies easily. In the title story, the narrator hires an actor to pose as Finn, the friend he invented to convince his new boyfriend he’s not a pathetic loner.
In “Aim for the Heart,” Troy accidentally kills a buck in an effort to convince his boyfriend he is “an avid hunter” (he’s not). “In the Palm of His Hand” features a man pretending to be Christian to continue dating a man so attractive he’s worth wearing a cross around his neck for. The collection intersperses flash-length stories that can feel a little thin compared with the longer ones that allow readers to watch with rapt attention as each protagonist spirals out of his or her artifice. Some of the conceits across the book feel so similar, you’d expect it to drag, but every lie reveals itself so exquisitely that the parallels become an added pleasure, as soon as we uncover the ways they diverge.
Kispert’s acute observational skills cut most sharply in fleeting moments of jealousy. In “Breathing Underwater,” Gavin, who has kept up a four-year lie to his boyfriend about being a professional diver, watches from ashore as another couple splash around in the ocean in front of them: “The amount of fun they were having seemed, to Gavin, to border on caricature. ” The narrator of “Rorschach” notes that a man he hired “seemed agreeable — a trait I’ve grown to loathe,” deciding the man is, in fact, “just feckless. ” In the final story, “Mooring,” the same narrator from the title story is left alone to justify his lies only to himself: “We tell lies to make ourselves believe the stories we have, to sink them deeper into us, so we don’t forget.
So we can’t. ” But by that point, the reader knows even the most seasoned storyteller can’t fool himself, let alone us, into trusting such a clearly forced excuse. DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIESStoriesBy Vanessa Hua290 pp. Counterpoint.
Group Text “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” will spark lively conversation among people who have run out of things to say. Welcome to Group Text, a mo...
Paper, $16. 95. The characters in “Deceit and Other Possibilities” formulate their deceptions scientifically. They take great care to cover their bases, hoping their lies might serve as stopgaps until they can make them come true, until the lives they are actually pursuing begin to take proper shape.
The most memorable stories address familial expectations placed on the next generation: A closeted gay couple pretend to be traveling roommates when they run into family friends at a bed-and-breakfast; a pastor bribes an entire East African village to claim he converted them on a mission trip, to save face with his family and congregation; a man in his 70s returns to a tiny town west of Hong Kong to fulfill his (he thinks) dying mother’s wish that he marry someone from home. These lies are not frivolous, but motivated by a paralyzing desperation: Telling the truth would require these individuals to admit, to their families and themselves, that they must compromise the expectations and beliefs imposed on them. Hua covers an impressive range of life circumstances, her characters both old and young, of varying sexual orientation, from immigrant families of Chinese, Korean, Mexican and Armenian descent.
“At times her seeming urge to represent so many different identities can dilute the main effect, but mostly these shifts in context are handled artfully; you can tell the author is dedicated to getting the details right.”
In my favorite story, “Accepted,” a student pretends to have gotten into Stanford, going so far as to audit classes and join the campus R. O. T. C.
program in the hopes that the school might eventually admit her before her parents catch on that she has let them down. Throughout the ruse, she and her father show their affection for each other only through vocabulary words they’ve learned together in study drills. “Assiduous,” he tells his daughter out of pride for her so-called achievement, “his praise for my hard work. ” She replies in kind; with the word “sagacity,” she “thanked my father for his wisdom.
” These inventive codes of communication — dogged in their attempts to convey respect, honesty, affection — abound throughout the collection, laying bare the burdens of the unspoken. SO WE CAN GLOWStoriesBy Leesa Cross-Smith246 pp. Grand Central. $26.
The characters who populate “So We Can Glow” aren’t afraid to state plainly either their bold overtures or their fumbling missteps. They name their desires, and go after them without reservation. Though the 42 stories here often masquerade as slices of domestic life, the scale of the emotional trajectories is treated with the weight of the epic. They are sexy and sly.
The dialogue winks and sparks on the page, making every story feel like a flirt. The collection overloads the senses. Even the “sunset light ached,” “lime tastes like good luck,” a woman lusts after a man who stinks of “hot wild onions in burnt brown-sugar dirt,” and pleasure can be found when you “lift up” after pressing on a “yellowish-blue, purple-black bruise”: Cross-Smith’s descriptions are filled with equal amounts of violence and tenderness. The author’s experimentation with form — one story is structured as a play script, others as exchanges over text or email — doesn’t prove as rewarding as the way she plays with conventions of linked narratives.
Throughout, characters from earlier stories reappear to nudge us in the ribs, these rewarding inside jokes building depth and resonance. It is the strength of the female characters, though, that truly binds this collection together. Women appear to sacrifice for others, but at the root of those acts of generosity lies an unabashed commitment to making their lives exactly as they want them to be. In “Get Rowdy,” the narrator sets out to secretly repay the debts of the man she secretly loves by offering sexual favors to his creditors.
But by the end, it becomes clear she’s performed this penance so she can rationalize being with him, the only way to wipe his slate clean enough that she can admit her feelings out loud. In one story, a wife commits herself to helping her husband become as electric as she knows herself to be. “Her husband was a good man and she loved him, but he didn’t know how to be special, how to glow. She said it was pretty simple and she’d teach him.
There was no big secret. You just had to let the things in your heart get real dark first. ” The women throughout this collection are constantly being revealed by a powerful inner light.
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