Drinking with the Cook

This finely wrought collection impressed me with the many ways Laura Furman is able to elaborate simple themes of outsider-ness and disillusion. Each character and situation is unique, rendered with exactitude and a calm, clear-eyed pity. And for each, the yearned-for ideal of home remains just beyond reach; however much work and attention is lavished on house and garden, the protagonists cannot make for themselves a home. Although most of the viewpoint characters are women, the long, beautiful story "Melville's House" concerns an elderly, dying man taking a day-trip with his daughter and grandson to the great writer's "Lourdes of disappointment," where Melville realized he would not succeed financially after pouring heart and talent into Moby Dick. Along the way, David has time to reflect on the home he tried to create for his family, and whether he remained only a tolerated outsider in it."Hagalund," another long story, concerns a young American woman living in Stockholm during the Vietnam War. She has enough vicarious status among the other draft-evaders and radicals to be offered shelter with them, although her famous boyfriend remains on the lam in the U.S. The expatriates' provisional, bored, paranoid existence during the miserable winter is memorably evoked, as the heroine gradually awakens from her tranced dependence.In the sharp, impressive title story, a woman gives up job and New York apartment to live in the coutnry with her lover. Previously, they have visited each other for various lengths of time, and she has idealized his situation. When the narrator makes her move, she brings a slightly ridiculous, Martha-Stewartish sensibility to his rustic, rumpled lifestyle and learns too late that his larder and bed are already well-stocked by his best-friend's wife.I strongly recommend these eloquent stories.

This is a book for people who delight in quiet, reflective fiction and for those with an ear for the delicate rhythms of English prose. The stories deal mostly with women, and domestic themes--relationships, houses, families--prevail. There is a subtle depth to all of the people and their lives. Nothing catastrophic occurs, but you can feel the seismic charges that underlie the most ordinary lives. Willa Cather, Peter Taylor, and John Hersey come to mind as writers whose styles are equally quiet and meaningful. Above all, Furman is an American Chekhov.