"If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This"

Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty of finding new or at least not terribly overused words for book reviews. I was impressed with Tony Taccone’s saying that good writing has a certain “molecular excitement.” I just finished a book for which I am going to borrow Taccone’s phrase: Robin Black’s collection of short stories, “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This” (Random House, 2010), has that molecular excitement. These stories pretty much knocked me over with their brilliance. Each story creates its own startling, compelling small world, one that is simultaneously mysteriously “other” and yet very familiar. The characters are generally well meaning, yet cannot help blundering in their relationships with the closest people in their lives. Over and over again, good people fail each other. There are secrets, mistakes, and tragic accidents that have to be absorbed and survived, somehow. The characters struggle, yet -- because they have no choice, really -- manage to muddle through and even transcend the difficult events. The stories have particularly painful yet loving things to say about family. One father tries to cope with his daughter’s blindness; another tries to reconcile with his long semi-estranged daughter. A pair of twins in their sixties are still trying to figure out their relationship with each other; then an accident changes everything. A woman has lost her brother when she was young, and now these many years later tries to comfort her teenaged son whose best friend has died in an accident. A woman with a much older husband tries to protect him from knowledge of her own illness, and at the same time to deal with her grown daughter’s infidelity. These stories are truly gripping. Highly recommended.