The Art of Absence

There's wit, variety, and imaginative boldness in this collection of stories, as well as a pleasurable richness of detail that captures different social, geographical, and natural environments with precision and grace. That attunement to place--whether the nursery downstairs from the Middle America bowling lanes or the TriBeCa restaurant with its trendy menu-of-the-minute--conveys not only the world these characters inhabit, but their consuming, poignant hunger. Though the overt subject of most of these stories is passion that transgresses the boundaries of marriage and of other familial and professional codes, what the characters act out in surprising, creative, and sometimes terrifying ways are the hopes and unforeseen consequences of the post-war suburban dream of the perfect place, the home that will satisfy every need and settle all questions. Children of the migrations that brought their grandparents from Europe and their parents from the city, Passanante's characters, planted in an Eden meant to end desire, find themselves dreaming of other places, of cities, of the East (whether Boston or India), of transient apartments and hotels--and of other houses, houses that, no matter how familiar their mass-produced design, might just become, contain, or conceal some unknown and absolutely necessary secret ungraspable at home--perhaps that life unlived while the dreamers passed their own youth in striving to act out their parents' dreams. So these transgressive characters break into houses, or break through their own walls with power tools--and, when they can't do either, peer in from the wrong side of nighttime windows. For readers, these stories themselves are windows onto the unspoken reality behind the cultural promises of that time, revealing the often violent and always irreducible mystery of injustice haunting those model homes, compelling the children who grew up in them to betrayals that may only be efforts to make some sense of a guilt that precedes any crime: the guilt of being human.

Like Passanante's other work, the stories in this volume are moving because of their humanity and the beauty of the writing. I felt that each story was a visit to a different room in the house of the soul (though there are doors between the rooms and influences move from one to another). Passanante's writing is sensuous, in its concreteness, its imagery, and the descriptions of sensation and feeling. It is also precise--I never found an unnecessary or a not-quite-right word. The characters are sexual, and Passanate's writing is wonderfully honest about the complexity of sexual feeling and expression. Sexuality is also their medium of expression, and the complexity of experience is reflected in the complexity of the characters' sexual feeling and behavior. There is much wit, and there is also tragedy. This is one of those writers who, even in her more gothic moments, describes a human being in a way that makes you recognize, sometimes reluctantly, some secret in yourself.