Book Reviews : Uncommon Writing on the Common Lives of Suburbia

The Garden State Short Stories by Gary Krist (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $16.95. 154 pages)

Could New Jersey, which seems silly to those who don’t live there and to some who do, be obsolete as well?

Gary Krist does not think so. But he raises the possibility, just as he raises all manner of other oblique and suggestive possibilities in these smart and tender short stories.

Houses, for example, trouble him. Suburban houses with their front and back yards--one of Jersey’s identity problems comes from calling itself the Garden State when the Back Yard State would fit better--their basketball hoops, their stubby driveways, their effortful grass, and the light from a crowded and overworked sky, proclaim the stable and nuclear family.

Life nowadays may be more nuclear, but it is certainly less stable. Children have always left home; and husbands, sometimes. Now, wives relocate in the city; and the dog is given away. The empty house with two bathrooms and one person left behind in it recurs in these stories.

A Vanished Connubiality

In one, it is a middle-aged man whose wife has remarried and who pads about clinging to a vanished connubiality. In another, it is a young man whose parents have gone to Florida and who remains, nerving himself to move. It is the latest version of the empty-nest syndrome, he reflects: The parents leave.

The eight stories in this first collection are wry, funny or sad; often, all three at once. A couple of them are contrived, though well contrived. In “Evidence,” the narrator, who carries self-sufficiency to the cold edge of madness, tends to see the world out of a borrowed I.

The others, written with enticing crispness, deal with pain of the most hopeful kind. In one way or another, it is growing pain: Growing up or growing old.

New Jersey, messy, polluted, resolutely non-magnificent, is a risky ground to choose for an author who would write about common life uncommonly. Krist succeeds remarkably in demonstrating that where there is life there is art.

What other writers have done with midnight train whistles, Krist does with the trucks shifting down on the New Jersey highways. He makes it the creak of a turning planet, a call that manages to lament transience and to celebrate moving on.

This occurs in one of the best stories, “Tribes of Northern New Jersey.” It is narrated by Josh, soon to be a high school senior. It is not Josh who is at the brink of change, though; it is his father. His mother has moved away--just down the street, in fact--and married an amiable Czech garage mechanic.

The father is becalmed. He cannot accept his abandonment; he takes sarcastic digs at his successor, and keeps everyone in a state of exacerbated nerves. Not only has he not come to terms with his displacement, but he is also struggling with the possibility that he may be gay.

Moving rather too fast, Josh, his girlfriend and his mother introduce him to another middle-aged man who has come out of the closet. With the greatest delicacy and wit, Krist depicts the father’s hesitation.

We are not certain whether it is a closet he is in, or simply a depression. Either way, after a series of comical and touching scenes, we have the moving portrait of a man, no longer young, preparing to face the unknown. And at the end comes the highway traffic:

“I knew that before the end of the year was up,” Josh reflects, “my father would have to shift gears finally, like those trucks on the Route 4 hill, scraping their clutches at the start of the long climb to Passaic County.”

In “Health,” another superb story, two young people in their 20s come to terms with the loss of their parents. In the case of Ilona, a tough, funny painter, the loss is literal; her father and mother were killed in a fire. Her uncle, a lawyer, is her final dependency; she keeps the typescript of a book of his in her refrigerator.

As for her lover, his parents have simply moved to Florida; but they are ailing and he feels a kind of symbolic orphanhood. He and Ilona make an odd and scratchy pair; Krist’s achievement is to show them growing up in a few pages, and turning to each other in a mingling of old loss and new attachment.

Taken Over by the Job

The author can be amiably far-fetched, but it is a trait that fits nicely with his stories about adolescence. In “How I Learned to Raise the Dead in Bergen County,” the hero is hired by a local funeral parlor to write eulogies about the clients. Gradually the job takes him over; he goes around interviewing relatives and constructing ever-more spectacular biographies. He begins to think, in fact, that he is bringing the dead back to life; that his eulogies are repopulating the world.

He puts on weight--his appetite increases immensely with all this life-giving--and he is arrogant with relatives who venture to suggest that he may be stretching things. Eventually, he is brought down to earth. Life is bestowed in only one fashion; and the consequences are laborious. His girlfriend is pregnant.

It is a comically tall story; its reality lies in its ability to suggest the faintly cuckoo, mildly manic-depressant state of passage from adolescence to maturity.

Time and again, in “The Garden State,” a contrivance which threatens to become excessively ornamental, takes on a serious purpose. Krist’s vessels rattle at times, but they are never empty. He is a remarkable writer, and just starting.