The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

(EriveltonMoraes) #1
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.

Silber 63 64 .indd 63 11 / 18 / 21 11 : 51 AM

Free download pdf