Alone With You: Stories Book

I've seen many great reactions to Marisa Silver's other books, so I picked this up to try her out. Uneven, but still impressive. The first few of these eight stories left me fairly cold, but I absolutely loved the other four, so it gets 4 stars overall. Most of the stories revolve around parent-child relationships.

My favorites:

"Pond" examines a father's conflicted feelings about his twenty-something daughter who is autistic and little more than a child herself when she gets pregnant during an unsupervised moment at her day care facility. The grandchild, who is completely healthy and normal, makes his affection for Martha more complicated. Burton's relationship with Martha and with his grandson reveals itself as something more than he had supposed in the wake of a near disaster.

Gary's perfection hurt Burton in a physical way. He felt as he did when he watched a theorem unfold seamlessly, the sheer elegance of it almost painful to witness because is presence in the world threw into high relief the incomprehensible mess of his life.

In "Night Train to Frankfurt" a grown daughter accompanies her cancer-stricken mother to a facility in Germany where an alternative treatment offers a last-ditch hope to the ordinarily super-practical and realistic Dorothy.

She proclaimed, if not a belief in, at least a tolerance for this latest of her mother's nonmedical solutions to "the cancer problem." This was how Dorothy referred to her illness, as if it were a tangled political issue that might be written about on the editorial page of her beloved New York Times, and then hotly discussed with the butcher or the man at the shoe-repair place when she went out each day on her brisk round of errands.

Helen tries to guess at Dorothy's motives in pursing this uncharacteristic course when she has always been the most predictable of women, while she deals with her own disappointment at failing as a professional musician. On the train journey,

Helen apologized for the jolts to her mother's body, for the cold smack of air that greeted them on the platform, for the distance they had to cross to reach the cab stand, until she realized that what she really meant to apologize for was the fact that no amount of flinty-eyed pragmatism would help Dorothy through this moment. The fact of simply being was sometimes an unbearable mess and what was hoped for in life was so rarely reached. The shortfall between those two things was so much more fumbling and base than anything Helen could ever have imagined.

"In the New World" a Polish immigrant to the U.S. and owner of a small construction company has problems negotiating relationships with his well-to-do clients and with his teenage son who has gotten a girl pregnant. Anticipating his son's future reactions to unfolding events, he dips into the past, remembers his relationship with own father, his father's grief at losing three other children, and understands the universality of parental fear for one's children.

The title story, "Alone With You," opens with Marie walking with a camel across the Sahara. She has had mental health issues and has come on this trip with her husband, son, and son's girlfriend, ostensibly as "an adventure," but actually so she can work out some answers to questions of her own.

They had come halfway around the world to have "an experience." And yet, there were moments when she felt more ephemeral than ever, when the gaudiness of this experience-hoarding made her all the more unsure of what it meant to be living.

The lack of authenticity in the tourist experience juxtaposed with her struggle to hold on to her own identity leads her to a decision before the trip is over.