64 The New York Reviewa bit pitiless at this point. The child
speaks annoying forms of adult- speak
but is still just a kid—both fragile and a
little heartless, like just about everyone
else in the story.
All the same, there is a good deal to
like about the heartlessness that tinges
this fiction. The young female char-
acters equipped with it—such as Iris
and Brenda, as well as Val in “Wants
and Needs”—make a point of avoid-
ing too much focus on their love lives.
The pains and longings of romantic
love are not absent but are kept slightly
offstage. In “Terms of Agreement,” the
narrator reflects on a time that has be-
come distant but for its images:There were many mornings,
years ago, when I walked from
your house to mine. It was a long
walk—there was a bus I might
have taken—but I was trying to
postpone my arrival, to let the
feeling of being with you languish.
Back then, this seemed to me like
a necessary condition for being in
love: to be immune to, or ignorant
of, the waste of time. In fact, that
was the last time I experienced it,
though I have been in love since,
as I hope you have, too. On one
of those mornings, the sun burned
the part in my hair, and for the
rest of the day I was consumed by
the image of my scalp, white and
unknown, streaked with one per-
fectly straight pink line.But at times this coolness blots out
the better feelings in a story. Here
and there I found myself becoming
the pesky reader offering secret dis-
approval. Would it kill you to call him
back? I kept asking when Brenda in-
sisted on ignoring her ex- boyfriend’s
phone calls. Which is not to say that the
stories here don’t include an element
of moral horror at the way the world
is—but it’s a response the characters
hold as spectators (not actors). They’re
young—they’re gauging what they feel
rather than weighing what they should
do about it.It’s probably worth reiterating that not
every story is about the young. In “By
Design,” a middle- aged woman with a
grown son is thriving in her work until
she’s suddenly hit with a suit for sex-
ual harassment. It’s wonderfully well
planted, coming as a genuine surprise
to the reader, and it’s followed by clever
ironies that unfold with shrewdness:
the woman keeps hoping she’ll see the
man suing her at the lawyer’s office;
her ever- out- of- work husband agrees to
a divorce without losing his place in a
book. In “Separation”—the last in the
collection—a woman who meets her
first husband while young and skinny-
dipping has a long life ahead of her in
the story, from early widowhood to a
misjudged affair, a second marriage,
and motherhood of a troubled teen.
All the same, youth is at the center of
this book. And despite its being wasted
on the young, youth has the power to
send out continually startling news of
what’s going on out there, timely reports
well beyond the obvious. Americans
like to talk about generational voices,
though I’m not sure Sestanovich would
want to claim such a thing for herself.
At times, the leanness and astute-
ness in these stories reminded me of
Ann Beattie in her early and middleperiods, when she was tuned in to the
conundrums of her own era (that being
the 1970s and 1980s). What’s notable
about Beattie’s fiction, especially in
collections like Distortions (1976) and
Secrets and Surprises (1978), is the
rightness of its dialogue and the arch
but not too arch ways in which unpre-
dictable intricacies of love and friend-
ship play out their beguilingly weird
rearrangements. It’s a white, middle-
class world, where sorrow looms rather
than catastrophe.
But Sestanovich is more ambitious
than that. The challenge for her, in fu-
ture novels or stories, will be to enlarge
her project while retaining her accurate
social observation and mastery of par-
ticulars. She is already able to delineate
in swift detail a narrow world, with its
standards and shames and swindles,while indicating that she knows it’s not
the whole world. This knowing is what
gives the work its weight.
And she has the power to subvert
conventional story structure yet build
a story with its own order. In “Wants
and Needs,” for example, the opening
seems to announce an inevitable clash
between two people: “The summer Val
turned twenty- five, her sort- of step-
brother, Zeke, came to live with her in
New York. He was nineteen.” Zeke’s
mom was once briefly married to Val’s
dad—a marriage no one in Val’s family
had heard about until her older brother
tried to kill himself and a family ther-
apist was summoned, dredging up
secrets.
Zeke is not a bad houseguest, though
he does start sleeping with her rich
roommate. Val’s own intimacies with
Zeke are strongest when she nurses
him with real kindness after a sandwich
gets him so violently sick she sees des-
peration in his eyes—“fear that made
him look either extremely young or ex-
tremely old.” But when Zeke goes off
with the roommate to visit her family,
Val masturbates to complicated fanta-
sies about being in bed with the two of
them while toggling on the computer be-
tween romantic kisses on YouTube and
“bookmarked porn”: “She finished dis-
tractedly.... What kind of person, she
thought, fakes an orgasm to herself?”
Though the end- of- summer farewell
scene with Zeke brings their sexual ten-
sion to the surface, the final sequence
takes us back to Val’s “real” brother,
older and once suicidal, who has drifted
to California, where there are “fires all
along the coast that year.” We’d for-
gotten all about him. It ends with Val
obsessively and perversely watching
the fires on- screen. Wasn’t this a story
about Zeke? Yes and no, as the narra-
tor might say. We’ve been tricked in the
best literary way. At the close, we’re in
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