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I don’t read many short stories, but I loved Mary Stolz’s The Beautiful Friend and Other Stories, a collection of tales about young girls on the cusp of adulthood: taking their first steps toward independence from their parents, navigating the difficulties of heartbreak and successful love (which can be just as difficult, in a different way), figuring out how to get along with their sorority sisters.
This last is explored in “Though I Know She Lies,” about a sorority girl who has gotten into the habit of trying to compensate herself for a socially unsuccessful college career by telling lies: at home she raves about her popularity at college, at college she attempts to cultivate an aloof and mysterious mystique by name-dropping famous people she doesn’t know as well as she pretends. After she’s nearly caught out in a lie (only for good fortune to send her a date even cuter than the cousin she had roped in for dinner-dance), it occurs to her that, perhaps, if you present yourself as aloof and superior and indifferent to everyone else in your sorority… they may not unnaturally return indifference with indifference?
One of those epiphanies that sounds stupidly obvious when you write it out - lots of epiphanies do, I find. (There are very few truly new things to realize in this world.) But in a story, as in life, an obvious epiphany can have the force of genuine revelation, and Mary Stolz is very good at coming at the epiphany just obliquely enough to make it a surprise to the reader as well as the character.
I also very much enjoyed the contrast of a story of epiphany refused: in “The Flirt,” Joan realizes that it is, perhaps, not very nice to set out to win a boy she really barely knows or cares about when she knows that he’s another girl’s only beau… and then shrugs her shoulders. Well, she might not like herself very much, but who cares when there are Seths to be conquered!
However, my favorite stories were the title story and the final story in the collection, “A Very Continental Weekend,” in which the character’s heartbreak opens into a more general realization that she doesn’t know who she is except in relationship to other people, and a determination to break free of her herd instinct and find out more about herself. Plus, this observation made me laugh: “A genuine nonconformist (not the ubiquitous sort you found nowadays who got together with a huge band of his fellows and followed a rigid pattern of nonconformity) was rare.”
All in all, a carefully observed set of stories, each just the right length to carry its observations.
This last is explored in “Though I Know She Lies,” about a sorority girl who has gotten into the habit of trying to compensate herself for a socially unsuccessful college career by telling lies: at home she raves about her popularity at college, at college she attempts to cultivate an aloof and mysterious mystique by name-dropping famous people she doesn’t know as well as she pretends. After she’s nearly caught out in a lie (only for good fortune to send her a date even cuter than the cousin she had roped in for dinner-dance), it occurs to her that, perhaps, if you present yourself as aloof and superior and indifferent to everyone else in your sorority… they may not unnaturally return indifference with indifference?
One of those epiphanies that sounds stupidly obvious when you write it out - lots of epiphanies do, I find. (There are very few truly new things to realize in this world.) But in a story, as in life, an obvious epiphany can have the force of genuine revelation, and Mary Stolz is very good at coming at the epiphany just obliquely enough to make it a surprise to the reader as well as the character.
I also very much enjoyed the contrast of a story of epiphany refused: in “The Flirt,” Joan realizes that it is, perhaps, not very nice to set out to win a boy she really barely knows or cares about when she knows that he’s another girl’s only beau… and then shrugs her shoulders. Well, she might not like herself very much, but who cares when there are Seths to be conquered!
However, my favorite stories were the title story and the final story in the collection, “A Very Continental Weekend,” in which the character’s heartbreak opens into a more general realization that she doesn’t know who she is except in relationship to other people, and a determination to break free of her herd instinct and find out more about herself. Plus, this observation made me laugh: “A genuine nonconformist (not the ubiquitous sort you found nowadays who got together with a huge band of his fellows and followed a rigid pattern of nonconformity) was rare.”
All in all, a carefully observed set of stories, each just the right length to carry its observations.
