With Unkempt, New York
writer Courtney Eldridge has delivered a snappy collection comprising seven
short stories and a novella. The stories cover a range of female characters
from a writer documenting her struggle to come up with a new story to a
wheelchair-bound food addict and a woman learning to accept her daughter’s
lesbianism. The characters share a compulsive quality, all obsessed in one way
or another with the minutiae of their lives, past trauma, or wholly imaginary
fears that are not even slightly amenable to reason.

The stories have New York pace.
There is no pause for breath with description or prolonged interior monologue. Yet
Unkempt takes us under the skin of a wide range of characters, and shows
the complex, often tragic aspects of their lives. Subjects like mental illness,
sexual abuse and morbid obesity don’t make for light or even pleasant reading,
but Eldridge gives us people with these problems, not problems with a life of
their own. Some cope better than others, but all are first individuals, never merely
a means to a moral tale. Not that all the characters have tragic lives. The
writer in Fits and starts is plagued by writers’ block and self doubt,
but that’s all, not that it seems trivial to her. And the phobias of the
unnamed protagonist of Sharks are the overwrought ideas of a woman who
simply worries too much. But when there is tragedy, there is tragedy. Some of
these characters are deeply wounded, and Eldridge makes no concession to any feelgood
factor in showing that. It’s not that she overeggs the dark aspects of these
lives. If anything, personal trauma is understated, and is all the more
effectively portrayed for that.

In The summer of mopeds
Eldridge has her protagonist rehearse a day in her life, Groundog Day style,
circling closer to a past she can’t confront. She gets up, makes coffee and
visits her therapist (there are a lot of therapists in this book) and catches the
subway to her accountant’s office. The accountant makes her cry. Then Eldridge
has the woman go through the routine again, adding more detail so that we get a
fuller picture of the drama of that day, and of the woman’s life. Then she does
it again, and again, each time adding a little more. It’s apparent early on
where the story is headed, but this does not mean Eldridge has given away the
story by telegraphing the plot. The real plot is in the layers of understanding
that are progressively peeled aside, until we are left with the full story, and
have a much deeper appreciation of it for having been taken through it one
detail at a time. Repetition is a theme in other stories too. A woman who repeatedly
visits a stationery store is the subject of Thieves, and the demanding
and the hopelessly dependent Becky in the story of that name makes repeated
unrequited phone calls to someone she met in her food addiction group.

What helps to carry these stories
is the razor sharp prose, the pace of the narrative, and Eldridge’s acute
observations. As the protagonist in The summer of mopeds progressively
reconstructs her morning (and in therapy an event from her childhood) we become
more and more immersed in the emblematic details that carry the story. A
bathing suit, walking past the accountant’s office rather than into it, the
black man in the waiting room, all are carefully observed, and the technique of
repetition means that we become very familiar with these details. In Young
professionals we hear of the etiquette of sharing an apartment with someone
who owns a cat, the cat’s predilection for men’s armpit hair, and the vagaries
of cat diets.

Eldridge also understands the role
of humor in describing sometimes painful experiences. In the title story, Unkempt,
Peg is considering her response to an invitation to lesbian daughter Jenna’s
PhD celebration. The reason for Peg’s equivocation is the embarrassing incident
that she caused when she fell down drunk, sans knickers, at Jenna’s graduation.
In the novella The former world record holder settles down a porn star
with an unusual world recounts her past peccadilloes to Joel, the ten pin
bowling geek she marries. In this story Eldridge fuses humor and irony, so that
we share not only the sadness of a young woman’s life and her seemingly
ill-fated attempt to settle down, but some genuinely funny moments as the two
unlikely lovers develop a relationship.

Altogether, a fine collection

© 2005 Tony O’Brien

 Tony
O’Brien, M Phil., Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland

Categories: Fiction