Female perspectives
What binds Roxane Gay’s 21 short stories in “Difficult Women” is that they are told with direct, plainspoken intimacy — the same voice that makes her personal essays so compulsively readable. She takes a reasonable tone to convey erotic, graphic and wry observations about the ways people try to love each other. Although her stories play with form, diving into realism, magic realism, speculative, noir and experimental fiction, unimpeachable narration leaves a reader believing.
As in Gay’s riveting first novel, “An Untamed State,” about a woman’s abduction in Haiti, harsh, nightmarish realities are woven into many of these narratives. Gay treats the power dynamics of gender, economics and race with a clear-eyed sobriety regardless of whether everything else in the world of the story is tinged with magic.
When I first read “North Country” in Best American Short Stories 2012, I enjoyed Gay’s insightful treatment of the complicated emotions that accompany the start of a new relationship after a relationship gone wrong. The story revolves around a black structural engineer working through a stillbirth she suffered at the end of her prior relationship. She fends off the aggressive advances of a married hydrologist and falls in love with a logger.
Rereading “North Country,” however, I marveled at how its placement next to more fanciful stories foregrounds its unabashed romanticism. Whether Gay’s stories are about rape or about the stealing of the sun, they are also nearly always about danger and love. This thematic tendency puts the collection into a more robust conversation with contemporary films and television shows than with most contemporary short stories.
Many stories in “Difficult Women” slyly satirize elements of pop culture while also paying homage to them. Gay references the tropes of onscreen romantic comedies and dramas and wields their narrative strategies to say something more interesting about the connections between people than the source material does.
William Livingston III stalks a biracial stripper who passes as white in “La Negra Blanca.” With his initially funny rap-fueled fetish of black women, he would read broadly — like a villain in a made-for-television movie — if sexual violence of every kind were not so appallingly common and underreported in our actual world. The resulting political fiction indicts white supremacy and patriarchy.
In the hilarious “Baby Arm,” the narrator’s boyfriend, a merchandiser, brings her a fiberglass baby arm after she has him watch “Mannequin” for the first time. She explains her job as a record label publicist: “We have to look pretty and make people believe in false idols and hold our liquor. For that, we are handsomely rewarded.” She and her friend celebrate the good fortune of this boyfriend by having an allgirl fight club.
Many characters in the collection feel like archetypes. They are often twins, literally or figuratively. The men are stone throwers, miners, strong men, “good” men or “bad” men. The women characters experience themselves as broken or exceptionally fragile or are perceived as such. In the allegory “Requiem for a Glass Heart,” a stone thrower who lives in a glass house with his glass family fears he will break his wife. The husband in “Noble Things,” a speculative story about a second Civil War, believes his wife “might shatter if he touched her.” Often, the women are tougher than they believe themselves to be.
Gay’s stories sometimes rely on shorthand in lieu of actual conversations, defying a rule of contemporary literary fiction that dictates finding the universal through the particular. For example, in “Bone Density,” about a marriage in which both spouses are having affairs, a narrator says, “I’ve cooked us dinner and we’ve made the small talk married people who know each other too well make.” It works here: There is imaginative space for any reader to fill in the blanks. Protagonists read as Everywoman or Everyman.
An inclination to combine fairy tales with social critique is one that the author has followed since her small press debut story collection “Ayiti.” Like Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” or Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” this is fiction pressed through a sieve, leaving only the canniest truths behind. The addictive, moving and risk-taking stories of “Difficult Women” provide a release valve for our collective dark anxieties and fantasies.
Anita Felicelli’s writing has appeared in the Rumpus, Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Email: books@sfchronicle.com