Twenty Grand

April 23, 2007
M
ostly female loners, outsiders and have-nots populate this marvelous, bleak debut collection. A young woman extracts herself from an overly insistent blind date who violates her privacy in “Big Bear, California,” only to find her usual certainty shaken years later by the memory of his grasping, petulant behavior. In “Summer, with Twins,” a college-age woman waitressing during the break wavers in declining her greasy boss’s indecent proposal, perpetuating a crisis of self-worth that reverberates through her tenuous summer friendships. Among the 13 pieces, surreal vignettes serve as a taut, dramatic counterpart to the more straightforward narratives: “The Wolf at the Door” in particular has a being-chased-in-your-dreams feel of danger and terror, as a woman battles to keep an anthropomorphic wolf from entering her house, until he asks her to open the door and her sister insists that she do so, saying, “it’s polite!” Delving into extremes of monotonous oppression, Curtis describes a reality that must be endured: her characters cling fiercely to their rationalizations, but even the more avaricious are sympathetic.