Honeydew

Starred review from November 10, 2014
Following Binocular Vision, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Pearlman offers this affecting collection that periscopes into small lives, expanding them with stunning subtlety. The title story is a perfect case in point, a snapshot of a private girls’ school in Massachusetts, where Alice, the respectable headmistress, has become pregnant by Richard, the father of Emily, a troubled but brilliant 11th grader. In this story, as in others, the relationships of the characters reflect the “nature of people to defy their own best interests.” In “Puck,” also set in a small Massachusetts town, antique store owner Rennie, “known for discretion and restraint,” is drawn to Ophelia, a customer who confesses to a love affair. Rennie breaks “cardinal rule one” and advises Ophelia to pursue another customer. Rennie’s heart opens wider in the moving “Assisted Living,” in which she lets the elderly Muffy help out at the antique store, and then is required to dispose of Muffy’s treasures as a series of accidents leads to an inevitable decline. Other gems include the magical “Dream Children,” in which nanny Willa and the father of her ailing charge discover the depth of their connections to the child, and the sensual “Tenderfoot,” in which widow and “expert listener” Paige and newly single Bobby—whose wife left him after he refused to stop to help out at a car accident—connect over their shared fate as “survivors now doomed to mourn until the end of their own days.”

Starred review from November 1, 2014
Pearlman (Binocular Vision, 2011, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) returns with another collection of closely observed, often devastating stories of more or less ordinary life.Pearlman is a poet of eyes and hair; nearly every story features an observation, often in the form of an arresting image, of these features. So it is that in the opening story, in which an art historian figures, a woman appears whose "eyes in her lightly wrinkled face were the blue of a Veronese sky," and so it is, in seeming homage to Chekhov, that in another story, a character sports "brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other." A vampire? No, just another character who's not quite comfortable inside his or her own skin, as so many of Pearlman's characters are not. Pearlman, who is in her late 70s, writes with the wisdom of accumulated experience, and many of her characters have suffered the loss of spouses, even if they themselves are not yet of age. One comparative youngster, a spry 49, has just lost her husband in war: "Each of his parts was severed from the others," Pearlman writes arrestingly, "and his whole-his former whole-was severed from Paige." Every word counts in that sentence, and Pearlman fills volumes with her economy of language, even if so much is devoted to such not-quite-usual matters as "corneal inlays" and people who bear odd sobriquets: "Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of assorted clothing from a junk shop." Without quite the moral gravity of Alice Munro but with all the skill: Pearlman serves up exemplary tales, lively and lovely.

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Starred review from December 15, 2014
In the first of 20 transporting stories gathered here, a lonely art history professor, newly separated from his wife, discovers that he can see into the pedicure parlor across the street from his apartment and devotedly watches Paige at work, ministering to barefoot seekers of comfort and renewal. Incidents of desirous surveillance and magical solace occur throughout this disarmingly pristine, covertly cosmic, and piquantly exhilarating collection by heralded short story master Pearlman (Binocular Vision, 2011). The director of a soup kitchen, about to depart on extended maternity leave, spies on her replacement, who, like so many characters in these tales, possesses mysterious, even shamanistic healing powers often associated with plants or animals. In the hilarious, fable-like Blessed Harry, in which a loving and eccentric Boston family harbors a peculiar plant that lives on coffee, mouthwash, and ashes, Bonnie, a surgical nurse at a Boston hospital, secretly observes Myron, her Ovid-loving Latin-teacher husband at his second job, selling shoes. Ovid is a subtle influence throughout, as Pearlman imagines gentle metamorphoses catalyzed by longing, as in the ravishing title story about the headmistress of a private girls' day school and an anorexic, ant-loving student. Pearlman not only writes with bewitching clarity, she also fathoms much about our inner lives and relationships that is unexpectedly wondrous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

Pearlman has been publishing award-winning stories since the late 1970s but became a household name (at least among smart readers) with the spectacular and incisive story collection Binocular Vision, which won the PEN/Malamud and National Book Critics Circle awards. This new collection should be an unassailable delight.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2014

The stories in this collection from National Book Critics Circle winner Pearlman (Binocular Vision) have settings that range from the 1950s to the self-Googling 21st century. In "Hat Trick," four teenage girls pick the name of their future husbands from a hat, while "Blessed Harry," a schoolteacher and part-time shoe salesman, receives a scam email inviting him to give a lecture in London. Pearlman sets a number of stories in Godolphin, MA, "a wedge of Boston"; Godolphin resident Rennie is mentioned in at least four stories including "Blessed Harry." Harry's wife spies on him once a week from Rennie's antique shop; in "Conveniences" she is the unseen aunt and owner of the second-floor apartment where the story takes place, but in "Puck" and "Assisted Living," she and her shop take center stage. The stories all have characters or situations that are a little weird; Harry's family has an anthropomorphic plant; in "Fishwater," Lancelot's aunt writes fictohistoriographia, a genre that through fiction rewrites history; and in "Deliverance," a cook at a soup kitchen uses unorthodox methods to cure mental illness. VERDICT This is good-natured if at times a mildly disturbing compilation that will appeal to most readers of short fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/14.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.