Stories sparkling with poetic vision

Stories

By Robin Black

Random House. 288 pp. $24

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Reviewed by Katie Haegele

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

is a fine first collection by Robin Black, who lives in Philadelphia.

Peppered throughout the collection are references to the city that you'd probably catch only if you lived here, too - people walking down Locust Street, home-schooled kids having class in Rittenhouse Square.

Each of the eight stories deals specifically with deficiency, illness, disability, death, estrangement: loss. Not in the vague, melancholic way of much contemporary short fiction, but deliberately. Black plumbs the topic of tragedy, always so seemingly random, as if certain she'll find meaning there.

"The Guide" is the story of a teenage girl, blinded by an accident at the age of 6, getting her first guide dog. "If I Loved You" reads like an open letter written to an inconsiderate fence-builder by his dying neighbor.

"Gaining Ground" is really nice, a not-very-plot-driven meditation on lost love, and on the place where emergency and the mundane - or, at least, the familiarly domestic - meet. It is a woman's reflection on the night the water in her house became electrified, shocking (but not really harming) her little daughter in the bathtub.

The piece allows Black to riff cleverly on the symbolic meaning of being "grounded." With the title, she makes a good pun that isn't cute, which is no small feat, and in this way she folds a kind of poetry into her prose. She does the same thing with "Pine," a story about loss and longing that opens with a nice image of a soft, uneven pinewood floor.

Black is in her true element when she's talking about art, writing, or language. In "Immortalizing John Parker," she captures a painter's discovery of her own need to paint with this explanation, neat in its fierce simplicity: "It was as though she had found a hidden primal drive in herself, something to align itself with hunger, thirst, sexual desire, the instinct to stay alive."

And in every story, she creates wonderful little images, sees symbols, double meanings, poetry everywhere. A woman in "Tableau Vivant" picks off her nail polish and the small piles of it are like "fancy-dress pencil shavings." Clara, of "Immortalizing," has several such moments: "A streetlight comes on. Clara waits to see how long it will take another to join it. A minute passes, two minutes. Nothing. They must have different levels of sensitivity, she thinks. They must believe different things about what darkness is."

If there's an essential problem with any of the stories, it's with Black's insistence on tidying some of them up, stating their larger meaning, thus ending them as you'd expect from a novel. She doesn't always do this, and "Tableau Vivant," "The History of the World," and "Immortalizing" in particular are satisfying for their lack of sweeping-up at the end, the resolution feeling more like resignation. Actually, that's not quite the word. The truth is that these three stories, like the others, have an essential hopefulness that buoys them, sends them bouncing back up to the surface once Black has finished diving into the wreck.

It's easy for optimism to read as hokeyness, and sometimes hers does. But when she balances it with sadness, with difficult emotions that are equally easy to believe in - when it doesn't need to please - it's both powerful and touching.

This is the case with "History," which talks ostensibly about death, guilt, and marital infidelity but is really talking, very beautifully and almost thrillingly, about language. Kate is in Italy visiting her brother, Arthur, after her unfaithful husband, Stephen, has left her. Arthur, Kate's twin, has had a lifelong difficulty with speech, forever searching for the right word - an isolated piece of mental slowness that was the result of a lack of oxygen during birth. Black does wonderful things with the silence that happens when Arthur forgets a word, as when Kate knows what he's trying to say but won't supply the word, out of anger, resentment, or something more murky. "He wants what she knows. He wants something that she has. . . . But she just shakes her head and shrugs."

This focus on language extends into the foreign language surrounding them, as when a description of coltura promiscua, a farming technique of cultivating more than one crop on a piece of land, plays nicely off of Stephen's infidelity. We even see it in the interplay between English and Italian, the place in the middle where speakers of both try to meet. "No, no, I can do English. You will see," a pretty waitress tells Kate and Arthur, and Kate befriends the young woman and ends up supplying her with words the way she only sometimes did for her brother. The waitress' halting, innocent-sounding English carries its own weight, and she gives voice to thoughts Kate might not have been able to speak.

At one point, after a car accident, Kate gets snatches of nursery rhymes stuck in her head: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. "Since the accident, Kate has felt oddly submissive to ancient memories, each seeming to grasp her, tenacious for a time, then pass because another has taken its place." It's a fine description of the way trauma can stir up the linguistic sediment of dreams and memories, things you might have forgotten were ever there.

This story, which ends with a stunning (and yes, hopeful) visual, is a victory. It ends the collection and feels like its natural conclusion, the story the others seemed to be leading up to, and in some cases were hoping to be.

Black has that certain something, that knack for poetic insight, that short fiction needs to truly sparkle. She can do English. You will see.