Lately

The short stories in Lately are like gems, shiny with intelligence and a delightful dark humor. To tell the truth they speak for themselves, making this the kind of book I wish I could read aloud to you over the phone. But that would take forever, so let me do my best to tell you why I liked it so much.

First there's author Pritchard's unique perspective. It comes through in her unusual metaphors, so lively and plentiful they spring out of practically every sentence like little toads. A belly dancer has eyes "as black as ripe olives," and a kimono has a "splash of bright magenta ... rushing down each sleeve like a sore throat."

It also allows her to bring to sparkling life a certain kind of eccentricity or madness. In "The Lost Pilot" she gives us Jay, a commercial airline pilot who has lost his marbles and sees things that aren't there, such as the Spanish armada on the ocean below his cockpit window. Later, in "The Honor of Your Presence," two crackpot sisters plan a divorce shower. In that story we get this description of a childhood pastime: "The painstaking toil, the great naive intent, the hideous results, the disappointment--no matter how far back you stood or how much you squinted--of paint-by-numbers." Pritchard finds beauty lurking in insanity and near-despairs at a toy: incredible. She connects dots we didn't even know were there.

Now, sometimes linked stories are pieces of a whole, and the resulting book lies somewhere between a traditional collection of short stories and a novel. The stories in Lately are linked, but the connections are fairly superficial and mostly geographical; all the characters live in and around a fictional rural Pennsylvania-ish place called Indian Creek, and their paths cross and histories intertwine now and again. The effect of seeing a character pop up again 50 pages later in a brief mention is the literary equivalent of deja vu. The feeling is not unlike the one you get when you hear a name you remember from your own childhood ... or was it college? Think a minute, it'll come to you.

There is a strong through-line connecting these stories, though, a truer link: the 20th-century American experience. Classic Boomer references abound. There's a dad who was a Fuller Brush salesman, a woman whose morning-sickness medication gave her baby birth defects, and two teenage girls who take the bus to New York and haunt the Village, looking for Bob Dylan. Though we've heard about these things before, they somehow seem unique to these characters, and to us--like in-jokes, you might say. "The Christening," for instance, is about an elderly woman who believes she's being tailed by a spy from the Central Grammarian Elizabethan Tramalfagorian Liberation Army. Hee. And therein lies what is probably the book's greatest strength. A kind of off-kilter comedy permeates all the stories, and there’s an appealing absurdity present in even the bleakest scenarios.

This relentless sense of humor is personified in Celeste, the only inhabitant of the short first story, "A Winter's Tale." Celeste is an incurable smart-ass, a woman who can't stop cracking wise even in her darkest hours, when "suicide came knocking at her door in its yellowed shirt and drab, ill-fitting suit, ringing the bell like a sugar-crazed trick-or-treater." Walking a tree-lined country road on a snowy night after striking a deer with her car, Celeste lets her mind wander. She remembers the joke she told at her husband's funeral (oops), and the day she discovered that her teenage son had gotten a tattoo. She muses: what tattoo would she get? Maybe the image of a Post-it note on her back, bearing the words kick me. "Why couldn't she be serious?" Celeste laments to herself, even as she chuckles out loud.

After I finished the witty, insightful stories that followed that first one, I couldn't help but look back and see Celeste as a proxy for Pritchard herself, braving the cold night, her flashlight bouncing through the darkness, her laughter like music in the woods.