"The Bigness of the World"

“The Bigness of the World” (University of Georgia Press, 2009; paperback 2010), by Lori Ostlund, is a wonderful collection of short stories. Each story is a precise, pointed, original, small gem. I love being surprised, and these stories are surprising, not in a strange, avant garde or experimental way, but in the sense of being unpredictable, yet very believable. The characters are intriguing; the reader feels she knows them, and yet doesn’t quite know them after all. And the characters care for each other -- family members, lovers, friends, even strangers -- but often find out they don’t know each other very well either. This feeling is captured in the last line of the story “And Down He Went”: “[A]t each turn, the people we hold close elude us, living their other lives, the lives that we can never know.” Ostlund grew up in Minnesota and has lived in Spain, Malaysia, and New Mexico, and traveled to many other places; many of her characters are also originally from Minnesota, and her stories take place in some of the same places she has traveled. This makes for a combination of a sort of Midwestern, calm politeness with a traveler’s stolid adaptability to the vicissitudes of world travel. But the characters also have a tendency to be unhappy, and the (mostly lesbian, mostly fortyish) couples have a tendency to be on their way to breaking up. Many of the characters are teachers, and as an English instructor myself, I enjoyed the humorous yet deadpan depictions of the importance of correct grammar to some of these teacher characters. I find myself wanting to write in detail about each of these eleven compelling stories, to illustrate how terrific they are, but I also don’t want to give away all the twists and turns and surprises, because I really hope you will find this book and read these stories for yourself. But I will list some of the titles, which will give you a sense of the unpredictability of the stories: “Talking Fowl with My Father,” “Nobody Walks to the Mennonites,” “Upon Completion of Baldness,” and “The Children Beneath the Seats” are a few of them. This collection, Ostlund’s first book, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and has received several other recognitions. On a more personal note, I am pleased to note that Ostlund is now a resident of San Francisco.