Rebecca Curtis’s work operates a step detached from the possibility of imagination. Her protagonists — mostly post-adolescent, pre-adulthood young women — lack any sense of entitlement, and seek stability rather than clarity. Set largely in the lakes region of New Hampshire where the author grew up (she now teaches creative writing at Columbia), the best of Twenty Grand’s thirteen short stories — many of which have been previously published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s — portray a woman’s late-teenage years not as a time for growth and experimentation, but a moment when dangerous precedents can be set.
In “Hungry Self,” a once-bulimic waitress tries to maintain her composure while serving her ex-psychiatrist; between courses, she snorts cocaine (bought with the night’s tip money) in the kitchen with one of the cooks. “Summer, With Twins” follows a hard-luck diner server working with two over-privileged, attractive twins who passively insult her lack of initiative and security, forcing her to consider having sex with her boss to pay her college tuition. In “The Witches,” a girl with few friends reluctantly decides to take a horny couple out on the water in her stepfather’s boat late on prom night.
Curtis’s single-young-women stories have redundant setups and often foreshadow disasters to come, but their narrow concepts allow her to explore myriad dynamics of trust and betrayal. The author manifests considerable tension from her protagonists’ revolving door of insecurities, so that the needs to be attractive, responsible, easygoing, and financially upright create an impossible recipe: try too hard to achieve one, and you’ll lose your grasp on the others. Curtis excels at presenting this dilemma through action. The relative lack of reflection — sometimes even good intentions — in her first-person narration is refreshing, making her characters’ various fuck-ups and split-second decisions more honest and primal.
| Twenty Grand | by Rebecca Curtis | published by Harper Perennial | 238 | $13.95 |
The strength of these almost neorealist stories makes her few forays into young-adult horror feel overwrought. “Monsters” over-exploits Curtis’s knack for describing insecurity and competition between young people by tacking it onto an absurdist premise, as two monsters knock on a family’s door and demand that one of the residents serve as their dinner. In “The Near-Son,” a woman has an abortion before the wedding of her lover’s best friend; her lover announces the news during his toast at the reception, and the crowd berates her as she defends herself obnoxiously. The story intends to give life to the paranoia and humiliation associated with abortion, but its metaphor rings false because the author’s characterizations do too: “the near-son was very small. It only weighed half an ounce. And even though it was precious to me, it didn’t know the alphabet.”These are ambitious hiccups in an excellent collection. Twenty Grand’s title story is Curtis’s best, wherein a child watches her broke mother give a family heirloom (an Armenian coin) to a tollbooth worker while driving to Portsmouth, to ask her National Guardsman husband for grocery money. You can guess how much the coin turns out to be worth. Throughout, the author’s language is evocative and unfussy, creating both a strong visual and an ominous mood (“For weeks, the sky had been a chalky gray that darkened to charcoal in the afternoon”) that again hints at disaster without revealing the severity of its impact. Curtis unearths great suspense from quotidian, hard-luck tragedies, and this strikingly original collection suggests she won’t run out of ideas anytime soon, because they’re all around us.
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Christopher Gray: cgray@phx.com
