Book Review

“Almost as soon as I began, it was obvious I was too rusty,” relates the narrator of “Happiness,” a story in Marian Crotty’s excellent new collection, Near Strangers. On the verge of being dumped by her first girlfriend, she hopes to find solace in the trumpet to which she dedicated so much of her early life, but what she finds is greater disappointment:

My tone wasn’t clear or consistent, and I could no longer reliably hit the high notes. I knew I could eventually get it back with weeks of serious practice, but I also knew that I wouldn’t put in the time, and this brought a new adult kind of sadness: the conscious choice to leave something worse than it could be.

It’s just one of many subtle moments of dawning maturity that Crotty renders in the excellent collection. The book, Crotty’s second, won the 2023 Autumn House Fiction Prize, and it’s remarkable for its consistency and depth of feeling.

“Compare and Contrast” takes the form of a middle-school essay comparing the narrator’s life to that of Anne Frank. What starts as simple parody becomes a profound meditation, tinged with regret, about the narrator’s missed opportunity to connect with her uncle, who just died of AIDS. The material is deftly, and humorously, handled:

Before I go on, I would like to address the parents who complained about the book’s “inappropriate content.” I personally think it’s good to learn where the cervix is located since I have one and didn’t know, and despite what Jessica Hendrick’s mom said at the school board meeting, I’m not convinced that the January 6, 1944, entry means Anne was gay.

Although Crotty’s own mature consciousness is of course responsible for the elegantly composed story, the voice that delivers it rings middle school throughout, which makes the brutal material all the more powerful. A collective we voice plays a similar role in “Family Resemblance” about a group of parents, most of them queer women, who’ve used the same sperm donor, whom they refer to as Jake Gyllenhaal. In the hands of a lesser writer, the first-person plural can be distracting (or worse: a showy attempt to jump out of the slush pile), but Crotty uses it to make space for several idiosyncratic mothers as opposed to privileging just one of them.

In “Near Strangers,” Betsy is retired, single and estranged from her only son. She volunteers for an organization called SAFE, which “stands for something—she can’t remember what exactly,” and her job with SAFE is to support victims of rape and to liaise between them and the police who hope to investigate their cases. The story centers on Betsy’s attempt to help a young woman named Lenna who was assaulted, coincidentally, after a casual sexual encounter arranged through Tinder, which Lenna has been using to ease her transition back to living with her parents. Betsy struggles to make sense of Lenna’s life, as well as her own role in supporting her, and in the end she must give way in favor of the young man from Tinder, who shows up, unexpectedly, to make his own attempt at giving comfort. That Betsy is willing to make space for something she doesn’t understand shows her maturity, a trait she must rely on to navigate her fraught relationship with her own son. There’s a delightful section about Betsy’s relationship with her son’s ex, Zaid, who feels a mysterious (to Betsy) compulsion to keep in touch with her, going as far as inviting her over for holidays with his new husband and their children. Without too heavy a hand, Crotty has written a very moving story about how the relationships we choose, unusual though they may be, can buoy us when more traditional relationships fail.

In “Near Strangers,” Crotty skillfully mines the generational disconnect between Betsy and the younger people around her, but she’s less successful in “Chincoteague.” In that story, a mother tries to manage her young-adult children and their paramours over the course of an early-pandemic trip to the Virginia island of that name. The mother, who, unlike many of Crotty’s characters, isn’t queer, comes off a bit flat, saddled as she is with bourgeois values. She struggles to relate to her children, although she does an admirable job making room for their quirks. And the children themselves, unlike the narrator of “Compare and Contrast” and the protagonist of “Halloween” (another excellent story, selected by Curtis Sittenfeld for The Best American Short Stories 2020), veer into caricatures of damaged Gen Z young people. Or maybe I underestimate them, as the mother seems to have done.

But if “Chincoteague” is the weakest story in the collection, it isn’t weak by any stretch. What’s remarkable about the collection is the consistent quality of each story; not one of them tempted me to put down the collection and come back to it later, which is a great risk in reading (and writing) story collections as opposed to novels. The stories here should appeal to readers of traditional, well-wrought literary fiction, and in particular to fans of LGBTQ fiction. I was reminded of fine stories by Tessa Hadley and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, but Crotty has a voice all her own.