"Daddy," by Emma Cline

The characters are ordinary, but with an air of disappointment. They are passive, feeling that things happen to them without their will or control. They limply hope that things will get better, but don’t do much to change things. To be clear, though, these are people who are basically OK – safe and healthy and with enough money. Nothing truly bad is happening to them, just a sense that life is not living up to their expectations. These are the people in Emma Cline’s short stories, in her new book, “Daddy” (Random House, 2020). Cline’s name may be familiar to readers, as her 2016 novel “Girls” was a bestseller. Rachel Kushner’s back cover blurb compares Cline to Mary Gaitskill and Joy Williams. It happens that although I have respect for Kushner, Gaitskill, and Williams, all of whom I have read, I have not really enjoyed their work. There is something chilly about the work in each case. Yet although I understand Kushner’s comparison of these writers’ work with Cline’s stories in “Daddy,” the note of sadness (often inchoate) in her stories ameliorates some of the aforementioned chill. I should note too that there is a mildly tawdry feeling to some of the stories, as in the story (“Los Angeles”) of the middle-class girl who has moved to Los Angeles hoping to be an actress, knowing how predictable she is being, and who although she has a (low-level) job and some support from her mother, stumbles into selling her underwear to men to make some extra money. She distances herself from this scheme by taking an ironic tone; “It was that time of life when anything bad or strange or sordid happened, she could soothe herself with that thing people always said, ‘it’s just that time of life.’ When you thought of it that way, whatever mess she was in seemed already sanctioned” (p. 46). Many of the other characters in the other stories in this collection reiterate this passivity and acceptance of “fate,” this avoidance of responsibility for their own lives and decisions, as I commented at the start of this post. Thus the stories claim our attention but somehow end up dampening that interest.