Book Review : Compassionate Look at the Way We Are

These Things Happen by Marian Thurm (Poseidon Press: 15.95; 153 pages)

There are at least seven distinctive varieties of love in the 16 pages of “Lovers”; four in “Sanctuary”; two in “Ice”, and none are duplicates. Even so, to call Marian Thurm’s third collection of short fiction “love stories” is an understatement, if not an actual misrepresentation. The resigned irony of the title surfaces throughout the book, sometimes explicitly stated, always implied, calling our attention to the astonishments concealed behind the facade of everyday life.

Each of the 10 stories begins with a vision of absolute ordinariness. A mother and daughter are having breakfast in a pancake house; a family assembles for a bar mitzvah; a young man instigates the break-up of an eight-year love affair. These things happen a hundred times a day wherever you are. A divorcee calls a service to rid her attic of squirrels; three strangers meet at a Los Angeles wedding; a pair of teen-aged girls helps a young mother carry the baby’s carriage upstairs.

There’s nothing even faintly ominous in these bland opening scenes; not the slightest hint of the revelations to follow, no sign that we’re about to tour the battleground of a social revolution and confront the casualties. A page or so later, we’re in the midst of the upheaval that has reversed the roles of parents and children, redefined the whole idea of family and rearranged the patterns of human connection into entirely new configurations. “These Things Happen” shocks us into awareness of how radically the world has changed in the past two decades, and how passively we’ve accepted--even welcomed--those changes.

In “Lovers,” a widow and her grown daughter go South to visit the widow’s father. The widow is ecstatically in love; the daughter’s marriage is disintegrating. When the brother with whom the father was sharing a house abandoned him to marry a woman met in a shopping mall, the father found a surrogate family in a young Indian woman and her small son, creating a design for living once unimaginable but now altogether plausible.

“Sanctuary,” the bar mitzvah story, graphically illustrates another contemporary phenomenon. A man has left his wife for a male lover but is still enough of a traditionalist to want the religious ritual. Hand in hand, the parents stand as required for the ceremony as the lover watches from a discreet distance and the grandparents struggle to maintain the charade. After the service, the wife is calmed by her husband’s companion, who is in the best possible position to understand her particular emotions at that moment.

“Leaving Johanna” is the story of a relationship that has run its course. Because there was never a marriage, there can’t be a divorce. Desperate to escape from the connection, Charles invents an affair, almost convincing himself that there is actually another woman. Free to be themselves for the first time in eight years, Johanna and Charles exchange roles in a switch that’s poignant, funny and total.

In “Romance,” a bachelor meets two attractive women at a wedding reception. They’re mother and daughter, inseparable since their simultaneous divorces. In violation of all the usual rules, they not only work together but live together in symbiotic harmony; even, to the bachelor’s astonishment, driving their car in tandem. Expecting to date the daughter, he winds up with the mother as well, realizing that there’s no room for an outsider in their hermetic world, complete and perfect in itself.

Vanished World

In showing us what our lives have become, these 10 stories also indicate what we’ve lost. Entirely non-judgmental, they nevertheless call up a vanished world in which families consisted of parents, children and collateral relations; a world of clear social, professional and sexual identities, of pleasant hometowns and livable cities, of security and trust that now seems almost as exotic and remote as feudalism.

Inadvertently or not, “These Things Happen” becomes an exercise in nostalgia as well as a witty and compassionate look at the way we live now. While virtually all contemporary writers are exploring these themes, Thurm’s collection is distinguished by its satiny prose style; humdrum speech is buffed to a glow and brightened by a vigorous sense of the absurd.