Ten absorbing tales by Lily King
The past lingers like a ghost in award-winning writer Lily King’s new short story collection, “Five Tuesdays in Winter.” It’s the first such collection from the author of the critically acclaimed “Writers & Lovers” and “Euphoria,” yet its 10 stories are as absorbing as any ofher novels.
Though there is ample variety in the collection that shows off King’s range, there is a unifying theme throughout: the question of how much characters’ pasts should determine their futures. A couple of early stories have a reflective tone as characters look back upon moments in their teenage years that will later have an impacton their adult lives.
The opening story, “Creature,” is imbued with an uneasy nostalgia that feels eerily similar to the first half of King’s 2010 novel “Father of the Rain” as a 14-year-old girl working as a live-in summer nanny falls under the spell of “Jane Eyre” and discovers a love for writing while mistakenly believing she’s found her own Mr. Rochester. But “When in the Dordogne,” another story of a defining summer, is a much sunnier memory of character’s teenage days when two college-age young men care for and pay some much-needed attention to the main character while his parents are in France.
In other stories, the past is less something to be revisited and more something that confronts characters in jarring ways. The pain a moody young woman feels after the loss of her father becomes something from which she can no longer hide in the haunting “North Sea,” and in the climax of “Timeline,” the story most similar to King’s most recent novel, “Writers & Lovers,” the leading lady’s history is both a savior and an intruder at the wedding of a childhood friend.
To varying degrees in all of the stories, the weight of the past hangs on characters’ shoulders like an overcoat, and King seems to be asking questions about the way it is best worn. Is it good to pull the past closer for warmth in its familiarity? At what point do our histories become heavy, restricting and best left at home? As in life, the answer differs in every story.
A grown man’s disturbing dalliance with his former best friend in “Hotel Seattle” seems to suggest there are certain doors that shouldn’t be reopened, but in the book’s heartwarming eponymous tale, a curmudgeonly bookstore owner — a man accused by his teenage daughter of “loving his books but hating his customers” — doesn’t let a previous failed marriage talk him out of falling in love with the store’s sole employee.
It’s a solid collection. While all the stories aren’t equally thrilling, King manages to make each one memorable, and, because of the core theme, they feel like they belong in the same book. The fraught relationship people have with the past wears a different face in each story, revealing the complexity of the issue, but each character’s struggle feels human and relatable, largely due to the emotional intelligence with which King writes and how quickly her characters feel familiar.
In only a few short words, Lily King can communicate a character’s worldview, their desires ,their heartbreak. It’s a skill that shines through in her longer work, as readers of her rich novels can confirm, but it serves her nowhere better than in these works of short fiction, eliminating the intimidation factor of short story collections and making each tale feel like a teaser of a longer book we can’t wait to read. “Five Tuesdays in Winter” is a layered and satisfying collection that will be a treat for fans of King’s novels.