Eccentric Characters in Peculiar Situations

To get an idea of what Julie Schumacher does well, consider a passage from “Dividing Madelyn,” one of the nine stories in this, her second book of fiction.

Madelyn, like many of Schumacher’s other characters, is a pre-adolescent girl coming to terms with a loss she feels deeply but doesn’t fully understand. Her parents, affluent New Yorkers, have separated; they alternate custody and battle with half-comic ruthlessness for her allegiance. Whichever parent Madelyn is staying with urges her to tattle on and turn against the other.

Trying on shoes while shopping with her mother, Madelyn finds herself with a choice between brown leather and blue suede. The mother, Lydia, asks suddenly: “Do you know why Arthur left me, sweetheart?”

“ ‘No,’ said Madelyn, with a shoe of each color on her feet.

“ ‘Well then,’ Lydia said, ‘I expect it won’t hurt anyone to tell you. Your father, Arthur I mean, well he may not like ladies anymore.’

“Madelyn rubbed the suede in different directions and watched it change color.

“ ‘Some people feel I shouldn’t tell you this--are you listening, sweetheart?--but Arthur may be a little bit queer. Did you hear me, Maddy?’

“ ‘Yes,’ said Madelyn.

“ ‘You don’t seem the slightest bit upset,’ said Lydia.”

Madelyn is upset, of course. We understand this in two ways. We can hear the fatuity in Lydia’s voice and assume that Madelyn can too. (Arthur, when it’s his turn, doesn’t come off much better.) And the images themselves suggest how conflicted Madelyn is. The mismatched shoes, the suede changing hue when rubbed with and against the grain--these are what poets call “objective correlatives”: not things explicitly compared with the girl’s state of mind, but things that seem, in themselves, to evoke it.

Schumacher, whose debut novel, “The Body Is Water,” was a finalist for the 1995 PEN / Hemingway Award, brings a poet’s eye and ear to most of these stories, along with certain minimalist tendencies. Her characters, like Ann Beattie’s, float free of any recognizable social or political background. They are defined by their voices, their eccentricities, the peculiar circumstances in which they find themselves; nothing more. That so many of them are children only emphasizes their tenuous position in the world.

Schumacher is also good at beginnings. It’s hard to resist a yarn like “Levitation,” which opens: “Beanie Gandolfo showed up at the doghouse with a message for the dead.” Or “Telling Uncle R,” whose first words are: “Uncle R is the very last relative I have in the world. He is a homely old man, a pathological liar, and he is selling the house that he and my father grew up in. He says that anything within its walls is mine.”

What Schumacher doesn’t do so well in these stories is end them. Not content with humor and richness of language, she compensates for minimalism by stretching the plausibility of her plots. Uncle R forces all his belongings (i.e., the past) on a niece whose small apartment and tidy life can’t accommodate them. In “Rehoboth Beach,” two girls kidnap their older sister’s jilted husband in a vain attempt to keep him in the family. In “The Private Life of Robert Schumann,” a music teacher’s fantasies of 19th century romance seduce a junior high school girl.

This catches up with Schumacher eventually. With a couple of exceptions, notably “Levitation” and “Rehoboth Beach,” her endings seem either too pat or too vague. At one extreme, Madelyn punishes her parents by having sex with the grubby 12-year-old boy across the hall; at the other, in “Robert Schumann,” the fates of student and teacher are arbitrarily withheld from us.

The details have plenty of life; the stories themselves are contrived. Think of the work of a seamstress who does exquisite embroidery on burlap. “An Explanation for Chaos” is like that.