Between Sisters, review by Lydia Peelle

BEFORE YOU SUFFOCATE YOUR OWN FOOL SELF

By Danielle Evans

232 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95

Danielle Evans’s whip-smart first story collection charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up. Told from a close distance, these stories lack the rich patina of hindsight, their pleasures coming instead from an immediacy and an engaging voice. They evoke the thrill of an all-night conversation with your hip, frank, funny college roommate.

Evans follows girls and young women who are intelligent, gutsy and black. (Her few male characters orbit closely around sisters, girlfriends and daughters.) Rather than limiting the collection’s gaze, this perspective amplifies the universal pitfalls of coming of age in 21st-century America.

At a store in the mall, “girls 3 and up could get manicures.” Parents, whether two subway stops away or on a research trip in Brazil, are unaware of their transgressions. (The notion that “we are safe, with our families, until we are not” is a preoccupation here.) In Evans’s world, virginity is a card to play quickly and strategically. One character, looking after her 14-year-old cousin (Grandfather is dying, Mother is at a church retreat), sums it up heartbreakingly well: “I feel kind of sorry for her entire generation, because they’ve learned all the theatrical parts of sex so they walk around pouting and posing, . . . but not the basic mechanical processes of actual pleasure.”

This kind of voice — wry and wise, “brave the way you are when you don’t know what you have to lose” — drives the best of these stories. But the conversational tone belies careful construction. Evans likes contrasts. “Virgins” is set “the day after Tupac got shot,” giving a story of lost innocence an ominous undertone of gangster violence. In “Harvest,” a tale of prejudice and perverse cultural values, Laura, a blond college suite-mate, sells her eggs to finance a designer wardrobe while the narrator, Angel, watches with disgust and envy. “If they had wanted brown babies . . . they would have just adopted.” By the time Angel ends up at Planned Parenthood, the story’s quiet architecture is only slightly marred when Evans, who has a tendency not to trust her skill, can’t resist some neon signs: “They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me.”

Lines like this jar because Evans is otherwise so sagacious. She humanizes her characters with swift accuracy (Laura once “couldn’t say ‘Blow Pop’ because she thought it sounded dirty”). Equally economical is her treatment of place: these stories range over the Eastern Seaboard, settling often in the mid-­Atlantic states, where one character crashes at her family home on what remains of property “once large enough that it meant something for black people to own it.”

Evans hits a deep vein just below the Mason-Dixon, especially in her exploration of how an immigrant population has tangled the color line. “This was the new New South,” observes Crystal, the teenage heroine of the searingly honest “Robert E. Lee Is Dead.” “Same rules, new languages.” To hype up a big game, the school board hatches a rivalry between Crystal’s school, Robert E. Lee, and the recently opened Stonewall Jackson High (again, flashing neon: the football field is rumored to be a Civil War graveyard). One might expect Crystal to protest this arbitrarily incendiary move (she reads W. E. B. Du Bois on the school bus), but instead she concocts an elaborate prank in pursuit of acceptance, with disastrous results.

Fiercely independent, all of Evans’s characters struggle for a place in a world intent on fencing them out. But as her title suggests, the biggest obstacles they face are often their own selves.

Lydia Peelle is the author of the story collection “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Peelle-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print