Honeydew: Stories
By Edith Pearlman
Little, Brown and Company, 288 pages

Edith Pearlman is 78 years old. For 47 years, she has been writing quietly gorgeous short stories. (One, the astonishing “Settlers,” appeared in these pages in 1986). Although her fiction has been published in three of The Best American Short Stories compendiums, two of the Pushcart Prize collections, and three of the Penn/O. Henry Prize Stories compilations, Pearlman was mostly unknown until 2011, when her collection Binocular Vision became a finalist for the Story Prize, the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, which it won. Honeydew, her fifth collection of stories (she has never written a novel), is the follow-up to her long-overdue breakthrough, a book that will continue to wreathe her formidable talent in the laurels it deserves.

Twenty stories make up the book. Some are explicitly linked—the fictional Boston suburb of Godolphin (a ringer for Brookline, Massachusetts, where Pearlman lives) provides the setting for nine of them, and one especially beguiling character (Rennie, an antique-store proprietress) turns up as a main character twice. But even the stories that are set in New York or feature outlier protagonists feel connected to one another; all 20 stories unfold in the same rarefied milieu. Her characters tend to be well-bred, bookish types: Sometimes Jewish, sometimes not, they are Latin teachers, private-school headmistresses, architects, art-history professors, and the like, often with plenty of money and always with complicated pasts. Their names are fanciful, even twee: Ophelia Vogelsang, Myron Flaxbaum, McCauley Bell, Zephyr Flynn. Most of her narrators are women, and nearly all are over 50, but make no mistake—Honeydew is not a collection of quaint little-old-lady stories. Like Alice Munro, Pearlman confronts the earthier aspects of life with a steady authorial gaze. Violence and cruelty have their places in her genteel world, and sex turns up every few pages (never gratuitously, though in about every story, she doles out at least one deliberate erotic shock). Her characters are complex; behind their respectable exteriors lurk unconventional desires, peculiar obsessions, jealousies, weaknesses, and pride. Still waters, in Pearlman, run consistently deep.

Her plots, like her characters, contain multitudes: Often, they turn on a dime. “Tenderfoot,” the first story, begins with Paige, “a widow, forty-nine and childless,” whose mechanic husband joined the Marines against her wishes. “And then, three days into the desert, the tank he was riding met a mine. Each of his parts was severed from the others, and his whole—his former whole—was severed from Paige.” Now Paige runs a pedicure salon that’s a kind of “secular confessional” for everyone in town—including Bobby Farraday, a recently separated art-history professor who just moved in next door. Naturally, Bobby is nursing a middle-aged crush on Paige. He spies on her from the bathroom of his rented apartment, chats her up in the health food store, fantasizes about buying her a duplicate of his estranged wife’s otter coat. By the time he blisses out in her spa chair, long-neglected feet in her lap, we smile indulgently. Two lonely people, alone in a wistful short story at night—any reader can see where Pearlman means to take us.

And then she doesn’t. Bobby drifts off, “thinking of his mother and tender bathtimes. But a different memory muscled in.” The memory is ghastly—a bad car wreck he and his wife witnessed together—and the pedicure is (for the reader, anyway) revolting. Pearlman gleefully describes its by-products, “a mountain of translucent flakes of skin with here and there a toenail poking out and, on top of the mountain, a large bit of callus she had removed without his feeling a thing. He marveled at this exuda like a small boy proud of his poop.” This is a bit unsettling, but if we give it a moment, it works: Bobby, scraped and cleansed, is ready for a new life. And then Pearlman, with no warning, pulls the rug out from under us. Bobby’s ex-wife appears in a taxi and whisks him off-stage; Paige, left alone in the salon, is the story’s real protagonist after all. The final paragraphs—in which Pearlman reveals how the encounter with Bobby has cracked open the carefully constructed edifice of Paige’s entire widowed life—are unsentimental and quietly devastating.

This formula—the bait-and-switch narrative, the deceptively ordinary protagonists, the too-frank descriptions of physical details, capped off by a surprise ending that affects the reader like a depth charge—is Pearlman’s stock-in-trade, and she deploys it expertly throughout Honeydew. In story after story, her plots feint and bob and weave and reach false summits, only to sweep everything aside at the last minute to reveal some unanticipated truth. Although her writing is always eloquent, she never overplays her hand; the stories bloom elegantly, even cooly, into epiphany.

The stories “What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers,” in which a repressed woman takes on female circumcision as a cause, only to fall in love with a mutilated girl; “Flowers,” in which three Valentine’s Day bouquets disrupt the monogamous, monochromatic life of a long-married couple; and “The Golden Swan,” in which a pair of overweight spinster cousins become estranged, and poisoned by envy, on a cruise, are fine examples of this pattern. But the story “Hat Trick” surpasses them all. The plot begins simply: Four teenagers—June, Marcie, Sallyann, and Helen—are goaded by Sallyann’s mother into choosing the names of their future husbands from a hat. It’s a cute idea, nearly cloying, but as the story progresses, Pearlman darkens the mood in tiny increments, letting the girls mull over secret, inappropriate desires before they draw. “Let me tell you something,” Sallyann’s mother announces. “All cats are gray at night.” If the four girls follow through and agree to marry the boys whose names they draw, she promises, “you’ll be very happy. Well, happy. Happy enough.”

Now the story leaps ahead by decades; in five astonishing pages, Pearlman lays bare the rest of their lives. Marcie draws and marries Biff Gray, a reasonably suitable match (“Marcie and Biff both play around, I hear,” Sallyann says, years later). June tears up her paper in secret and renounces romance forever, while Sallyann, who draws a blank (someone, it seems, has sabotaged the game), gaily marries thrice. Helen marries Steve, a boy she’d never thought about until she picked his name. “She was protected by his devotion for the next forty years,” Pearlman tells us, in her characteristic tone of preternatural calm,

through all their woes: his job lost, twice; a malformed infant who lived a week; her brother’s intractable depression; the prolonged defiant adolescence of each of their surviving children. Even when she briefly left him, haring after a woman who had no long-term use for her but who liked to be tied up, liked to be taken from behind—he gravely withstood the desertion, gravely welcomed her back.

This is shocking to read—we’ve come a long way from innocent parlor games with hats—but Pearlman presses on, unruffled. It was only a game; it should not have mattered; it was silly and trivial; it was utterly life-altering. At the end of her mother’s life, Sallyann brings the “queer incident” up again. After quizzing the ancient old lady gently (“You knew there was a blank?”) Sallyann leans over her deathbed; her mother can no longer speak. “You did a marvelous thing,” she tells her. “We are all happy enough.”

The perfect weight of this ending—of all of Honeydew’s endings, truth be told—is difficult to describe. Pearlman conveys heft and profundity in few words and with the lightest of touches; her climactic revelations are never thudding or melodramatic, nor do her conclusions trail off disappointingly. In any other writer’s hands, a tale that finishes happily “enough” would simply not suffice. But Pearlman has a genius for restraint and for making sparse paragraphs speak volumes. In “Castle 4,” a long, complicated, fanciful story, she describes romance and death in almost comically muted terms:

IV poles were their best men…The groom had remembered to supply the bride with flowers, and he had brought rings for both of them. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was bitter.

He had signed up for vacation beginning that day, and as a family member he was permitted to sleep on a folding cot beside her bed. The walking stick stood aslant in the corner. It did conceal a sword, as Zeph knew. One night Zeph drew the sword from its sheath and swished it in the air, back, forth. Catherine laughed a little. He reinserted it.

From the cot he held her hand as both pretended to sleep.

She died a week later of renal failure—more or less peacefully, as such things go.

 This is not to imply that Pearlman’s prose is deliberately minimalist. Though her stories are beautifully crafted and formally coherent, below the surface they are deeply, indelibly strange. Subterranean weirdnesses enthrall her. Again and again, she follows her characters into the bedroom, and even to the toilet, exposing their vanities, laying bare their secret thoughts. She adores, and often deliberately evokes, the fanciful images and characters of children’s fairy tales; when describing her characters’ idiosyncrasies, she occasionally indulges in purple prose. She constructs entire plots around deeply (some might say overly) symbolic objects: a shoebox of jewels, a potion, a Roman coin, an antique statue.

Yet in scenes of heightened significance—death, despair, revelation—Pearlman tamps down her rhetoric and tactfully averts her gaze. A character who dies “more or less peacefully, as such things go” is not being dismissed with an offhanded phrase; rather, she is being granted privacy, a dignity appropriate to the scene. Epiphany, in Pearlman’s fiction, is a highly personal event. She does not aim for us to identify with her characters: If and when the scales fall from their eyes, their newly clear vision belongs to them alone. We may be moved, but we are not meant to relate. How can we, when we know so much about each character’s offputting personal habits? Why would we even want to, when we’ve seen through their polished exteriors to the flawed personalities inside?

“Nature is no respecter of seemliness,” a woman named Ingrid muses in “Stone.” Neither, in fact, is Pearlman. The stories in Honeydew are original, unsentimental, and profoundly bizarre; they are also—in the manner of fairy tales—archetypal and blunt. Their most resonant moments are deliberately subdued, yet their plots are deeply affecting. Their heroes and heroines—vivid and indelible and often, frankly, unlikable—are unforgettable. And all these characters, no matter how unlucky, no matter how strange, live happily—happily enough, that is—ever after.