In a book-length narrative, an author gets one chance at a first sentence. Among the delights of "Love Stories in This Town," Amanda Eyre Ward's first collection of short fiction (it follows three well-received novels), is that she gets 12.
"I first heard about Cipro at the potluck," begins the first story in the book.
"It's a crappy coincidence that on the day James asks for my hand in marriage, there's a masturbator in the library," announces the second.
"I had heard about the rib, of course, but did not expect it to be at the Smiths' Christmas party."
"They told us the baby was dead, and two days later we were on a plane to Texas."
"A woman had drowned in the lake, but that did not make it less picturesque."
"Raul was talking to me about the Hamlet product."
And perhaps my favorite: "She thought the baby shower would be canceled due to the beheading, but she was wrong."
If I were reading this review instead of writing it, those first sentences might be enough. They are filled with humor, intelligence and foreboding; they have freshness and frisson; they allude to cultural and personal moments I care about; they have a clean, seemingly artless delivery.
These are speakers I want to get to know.
The characters in Ward's stories feel like my friends; often, they feel like me. They are women conducting their ordinary lives in the wake of Sept. 11, amid the dot-com boom, in love and out, preoccupied by terrorism and house-hunting, by their husband's jobs and their father's girlfriends, by the difficulties of having children and the conundrum of what to do with them.
They've moved a lot, and they live all over the place. The "town" of the book's title is a mapful: Austin, Texas; Houston; Butte, Mont.; Savannah, Ga.; and Bloomington, Ind.; a corporate compound in Saudi Arabia; a cabin at Messalonskee Lake, Maine; a little house in Ouray, Colo.; a home hair salon in Rye, N.Y.
Although each place is carefully evoked, the effect is less that of a jouncy whistle-stop tour than a reminder of the Jon Kabat-Zinn line, "Wherever you go, there you are."
Wherever you go, there's Nails of America and "The Blair Witch Project" and "Pimp My Ride." There are therapists and glasses of wine, phone calls from your mother and notes from your boss. There are reasons to cry and reasons to crack a joke, and often these reasons are one and the same.
