Spare and edgy fiction by Southern Californian Glatt (A Girl
Becomes a Comma Like That, 2004) finds grim humor in soured
relationships and bad choices.
Glatt has a sharp eye for catching the incongruous detail that
nicely derails her characters’ tidy sense of themselves, such
as the gold nose ring worn by the bullying older student in the
story “Eggs,” a student who ultimately prods her professor,
narrator Lilly Lyle, to push her out of her chair. Lilly exhorts
the insulting student to “behave,” all the while denying
her own guilt in enjoying phone sex with a married man she met at
an academic convention in Arizona. In “The Study of Lightning
Injury,” a husband named Mack undergoes a kind of religious
conversion after being hit by lightning on a fishing trip with a
friend who’d admitted, shortly before the strike, trying to
make the moves on Mack’s wife. Mack won’t touch his
wife after the accident/revelation, insisting that he is “rewired.”
Ultimately, the story goes into a maddening attempt to sort a relational
perspective. Similarly, in “Soup,” a widow learns chillingly
how unrecognizable her 17-year-old son has become—running
with the same group of bullies he was once tormented by. The first
story, “Dirty Hannah Gets Hit By a Car,” sets the creepy
atmosphere of Southern California, a land “without sidewalks,
with lawns and flowerbeds that go right down to the curb,”
a seemingly innocuous detail except that Hannah, a schoolgirl whose
parents fight ferociously, has to walk to school alone at her own
peril. In well-developed tales like “Animals” (the zoologist
narrator contends with saving his zoo animals in a heat wave while
balancing trust for his untrustworthy wife) and “Ludlow”
(a couple of young newlyweds full of self-doubt and good intensions
visit the in-laws before the wife’s pregnancy starts showing),
Glatt clearly harbors tenderness for the underdog.
Polished, taut writing we want more of.
