Funny, warm, not easily predicted

Stories about life’s many interruptions

AMERICAN INNOVATIONS Rivka Galchen (Harper Collins Publishers)

The other week at the Cork World Book Festival, I heard the London-based Spanish writer Susana Medina discuss her story Oestrogen from this year's Best European Fiction collection and her relationship to objects. She pointed out every object is the result of a thought.

Rivka Galchen's first short story collection, American Innovations, humorously explores the après-thoughts and relationships to objects (and situations) that follow rather than pre-empt their creation. Likewise, the collection is a multilayered exercise in response, since many of these stories respond to earlier works by Gogol, Borges, Keats, Wallace Stevens and James Thurber.

American Innovations follows her much-heralded, distinctive debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. Galchen remains as funny, warm and unpredictable in the short story form as in the novel.

Much of this collection offers portraits of lives or moments in lives, abrupt pauses, interruptions, where contradiction, contrast and loss are the reigning components. Characters' dilemmas hinge on misunderstanding, secrecy and the general perplexity and mortification of being a human.

Galchen explores and thwarts contradiction to comic effect. (“I bought the book, but in some small attempt at dignity I didn't read it.”) She's also hewing possession, fetishization of “things” and specifically the emotional register of the loss of “things.” In two stories, Once An Empire and The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire, for example, the loss of a fork and a Parmesan cheese grater feature prominently. (“We had a particularly nice Parmesan grater and he had taken that. But he had left behind his winter coat. Also a child.”) It's hard not to salute any writer who could execute an entire text so amply around a woman's attachment to her white fork!

These stories afford us a way inside generational dilemmas (first jobs, taxes, property ownership and lack of ) without resorting to the vacuous ambling that infects many of the alternative offerings in this realm.