Fumblers and Dreamers
By LIGAYA MISHAN
Evgenia Citkowitz
ETHER
Seven Stories and a Novella
By Evgenia Citkowitz
243 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25
“Our best recyclers are in California,” declares one of the characters in Evgenia Citkowitz’s coruscating story collection. “That sadly includes its writers.” Meant as a barb, it’s also an archly self-deprecating gesture, since Citkowitz happens to live in California. But, really, what writer doesn’t recycle? Although Citkowitz trawls familiar territory (a schoolgirl engineers a sexual encounter with a teacher; a blocked writer marries a starlet half his age; an aimless, privileged woman is abandoned by her husband), what she does with this material is unexpected and often startling.
Consider the aimless, abandoned wife in the opening story, “Happy Love,” whose failed marriage is relegated to backdrop status, dispatched in a few telegraphic words: “No one died from infidelity.” The more immediate crisis is the surreptitious replacement of her daughter’s beloved hamster with a sickly, smelly impostor. (The hamster had been left in the care of the mother’s yoga teacher, whose lapse from ethereality when accused of making the switch demonstrates Citkowitz’s knack for farce.) Although “Happy Love” could easily have become a precious tale of a child’s first experience with death, Citkowitz has something different in mind. As the mother ministers to the ailing impostor, it occurs to her that perhaps he’s the original hamster after all, rendered unrecognizable by illness and age — like her own mother, whom she remembers on her deathbed with sudden clarity: “The three weeks it took for her limbs to waste, her skin to turn a liverish yellow and her mind to wash away on a sea of morphine.” The kind of imaginative leap you expect in a poem, it gives an otherwise slight story a small radiance.
Citkowitz’s book is peopled by mothers and fathers who are fumblers at best, unrepentant alcoholics at worst. A few are simply absentees, like the father of Beatty, the British schoolgirl in “Leavers’ Events,” who is omitted from family suppers, “disqualified by his status as a heroin addict.” The girl’s mother, a high-level fashion editor, is hardly more present. The only grown-up in Beatty’s life who actually behaves like one is, oddly enough, the rakish novelist she invites to the opera. After initiating a lazy seduction, he wisely thinks better of it. Again, Citkowitz flouts expectations: her heroine may be momentarily crushed, but soon she has moved to New York, ascended the editorial ladder at a chic magazine, landed her own office and effectively supplanted her mother — a modern-day Electra.
At times the stories seem too short for what Citkowitz wants to achieve, the epiphanies orchestrated too swiftly. The most fully realized is the title novella, “Ether,” which starts almost primly: a writer and his editor meet for lunch, eat sole, drink wine and gingerly discuss his novel in (very slow) progress. Having sex afterward “had not been inevitable,” the reader is informed. In the blistering pages that follow, Citkowitz sweeps from New York to Los Angeles, bringing together an ensemble cast worthy of a Robert Altman film, including a Hollywood beauty “into civil rights and whatnot”; the short, flabby, balding writer she makes the mistake of marrying; the autistic young man who stalks her; his truck-stop-waitress mother; an itinerant con man; a gurulike mountaineer; and an octogenarian Holocaust survivor. If it sounds like too much for a novella, it almost is.
Citkowitz has an impressive literary pedigree: her mother was the novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood, her stepfather the poet Robert Lowell. But her voice, particularly her rhythm — half staccato, half headlong rush — is wholly her own. She doesn’t sound like anyone else you’ll have read in a very long while.
Ligaya Mishan is a frequent contributor to The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Mishant.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print
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