The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

December 16, 2021 63

Continually Startling News

Joan Silber

Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich.

Knopf, 214 pp., $26.00

Clare Sestanovich’s debut collection of

stories, Objects of Desire, begins with

Iris, a young woman, flying home from

college. “She is seated between a mar-

ried couple,” we’re told,

because the man prefers the win-

dow and the woman prefers the

aisle, and they are the kind of

people, she discovers quickly, with

strong preferences. In general, Iris

is the kind of person with mild

preferences—preferences that can

be painlessly ceded to someone

else’s.

While the characters in the eleven sto-

ries gathered here have a range of ages

and situations, most think of them-

selves as having “mild” or irresolute

wants. Bolder personalities bounce

against the less willful ones, often in

startling ways—including on the plane

ride, when the woman returns from the

restroom with a positive pregnancy test

stick in her hand and jubilantly passes

it across Iris to her husband. “Are you

sure you don’t want to sit together?”

Iris asks. “Honey,” the woman re-

sponds, “you’re part of our moment.”

Iris’s mother, who fetches her at the

airport, tells her that it’s too soon for

the couple to have told anyone: “That

baby...could be gone tomorrow.” Iris

thinks of her mother as having “killed”

the baby with her words—the mother is

a relentless killjoy throughout the story.

Back at college, Iris has “a lot of sex.

Some of it is good and some of it is bad,

and she has taught herself not to care

too much about the difference. In gen-

eral, not caring requires studiousness.”

Near the end of her senior year she dates

a “virgin” named Ben, and they have sex

a single time, so close to graduation day

that they say “congratulations” instead

of good- bye. He never learns of the later

abortion, paid for with a loan from her

friend Charlotte’s parents.

We follow Iris in a tale that seems to

loosely wander, but whose title, “An-

nunciation,” is its thematic wreath,

half- forgotten en route. While the

fearless and glamorous Charlotte goes

off to LA, Iris finds a tiny room in the

house of a married couple who are in

a sexual relationship with another cou-

ple nearby. “You probably have a lot of

questions,” they keep saying, but she

doesn’t—whereas when Charlotte vis-

its, she asks the two couples right away,

“So, how did you all meet?” Charlotte

proceeds to have sex with the couples

and then returns to LA.

Not long after, Iris by chance sees

the once- virgin Ben through the win-

dow of a restaurant. She has never an-

swered any of his messages, just once

texting him Hey nine months after

graduation, a date whose meaning he

didn’t catch. He beckons her in—it’s a

gathering in honor of his grandmother,

who just died. His widowed aunt insists

on telling Iris about her wedding dress,

which her mother hated because it was

too bare in the back: “It was my conso-

lation prize.” “Consolation for what?”

Iris asks. “Oh, you know,” the aunt says.

“The husband, the babies. All that.”

The story closes with the aunt, who has

been toying with a sugar packet, blowing

the spilled sugar across the tablecloth,

scattering it. An image of this sort—

lyrical and beautifully mundane, empha-

sizing the ephemeral—ends many of the

stor ies, giving a degree of for mal unity to

these known and half- known characters.

Another story, “Terms of Agree-

ment,” follows a trio of young writ-

ers—the narrator, her then boyfriend,

and their mutual friend Nicole—in the

years they first hang out together. The

most charismatic of the three is Nicole,

who likes having an entourage and

becomes lonely and demanding when

“in between girlfriends.” The narrator

is less confident about her own gifts.

Early on she tells us:

When I imagine all the things I’ve

written, I imagine them piled up

in the kitchen, the mess of an old

woman who can’t bear to part with

her Tupperware—flimsy plastic

in every imaginable size, because

someday it might be just the thing

she’s looking for. The beginning of

a story, the title of an essay.

The narrator meets her boyfriend—

the “you” to whom this story is an

unsent love letter—through Nicole:

“We fell in love and Nicole fell apart.”

Though they’re not the cause of Nicole’s

breakdown, it soon occupies the couple :

“Her crying proved that I had never

really cried.” Nicole eventually checks

herself into a psychiatric hospital, then

slips off with only a call from the air-

port. When she reappears, she drags the

couple to a family wedding and recounts

a tale of the first girl she kissed and im-

mediately betrayed. Then in the next

scene, there’s the disturbing discovery

that Nicole has published a book, full of

characters who can be traced to all her

friends, with shuffled names. Not badly

written either. The narrator and the be-

loved “you” have already broken up by

the time the book comes out. She now

thinks, at the story’s end:

I imagine one day I’ll read Nicole’s

book again... and I—a person who

does not yet exist, a person I have

yet to invent—will wonder anew at

all that is left unsaid.

Anew. It’s a small form of al-

chemy. It’s worth waiting for. Like

building a building, like finding

God, like getting old and stacking

Tupperware and wishing for your

life, at last, to be contained.

The images that close these stories can

have this kind of poetic reach, this up-

ward tilt. If they sometimes feel a little

strained, there’s a structural beauty, a

hidden order “containing” the wander-

ing episodes. A remarkable talent is at

work here.

Sestanovich is an editor at The New

Yorker, where two of the stories in this

collection—“Old Hope” and “Separa-

tion”—first appeared. The latter was

accompanied online by an interview

in which she said that she began to

write the story at a period in her life

that seemed “to lack narrative coher-

ence”—people were coming and going

“with alarming finality” and there

were “no defining features, no unify-

ing theme.” But she knew from “the

way people tend to narrativize their

lives” that eventually she “would find

this ‘phase’ all too easy to sum up: oh,

yeah, my twenties.” The various stories

in Objects of Desire are, she says, all

circling this same notion of narrative

coherence, and what happens when it

fails to hold, “when we fall apart.”*

So Sestanovich has taken on the

challenge of narrating lives cluttered

with discontinuities, crowded with in-

complete causes and effects, and she’s

interested in what characters—who can

only know so much—tell themselves

about what’s going on. (The reader is

left deducing a bit more.) There’s much

to admire in the complications of these

unplotlike plots, always hopping over

the expected.

In “Brenda,” Sestanovich opts for a

bit of wry joking about such forms. The

title character, who teaches writing at a

college and lives alone in a trailer after

her boyfriend moves away, thinks her

students “fall into three categories”:

There are students with very dra-

matic lives, which they write about

honestly, and poorly.... Then

there are students who believe

they have dramatic lives, who

write at length about small mis-

haps and deliver the meaning of

their stories—the meaning of their

lives—in two or three conclud-

ing sentences.... Finally, there

are students whose greatest fear

is that they have no drama at all.

They come to Brenda’s office and

tell her they have nothing to say—

nothing worth saying. They write

long, precise paragraphs about ob-

jects.... What they avoid most of

all is plot.

Brenda likes these students best.

Sestanovich herself writes prose wor-

thy of this belief. Rarely is anything

in these stories less than convincing;

she is precise about her characters’

often elusive emotions. “Security Ques-

tions” begins with a twenty- six- year- old

named Georgia googling her lover’s

son, a fledgling filmmaker the same age

as she is. Georgia, who had a brief spell

as an actress and now works for a gour-

met meal- kit company, thinks about

her lost past:

Georgia and her ex- boyfriend

dated for six years. They met

during the first week of college

and were having sex by Halloween.

Georgia had never had sex before,

and she was surprised by how ef-

fortful it was—like taking a test....

I love you, she said, without having

planned to say it. Her boyfriend

smiled. When he said it back, some

dam opened up inside her. Like

being drunk, without the nausea.

The exactness of such passages is elating.

But readerly impatience can some-

times arise. This has to do with which

experiences are stressed, which angles

we get to view these characters’ lives

from. In “Make Believe,” a young

woman whose boyfriend has taken

off for an unnamed foreign city runs

through a series of freelance jobs as

a personal assistant to the wealthy or

pretend- wealthy and ultimately be-

comes a night nanny to a five- year- old

girl. It’s a job surrounded by odd forms

of coldness. “Rehydrate after crying” is

care advice from one of the day nan-

nies, and the narrator, less maternal

even than the others, can just barely

rue her “professional incompetence.”

Though it tries not to, the story feels

Nathalie Du Pasquier: Untitled, 2021

Nathal

ie Du Pasqu

ier

*See Willing Davidson, “Clare Ses-

tanovich on Narrative Coherence,”

newyorker.com, April 5, 2021.

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