TRUTHTELLING

A grab bag of realist and experimental stories, each one a treasure.

Subtitled “Stories, Fables, Glimpses,” Schwartz’s collection is mostly populated by New Yorkers firmly rooted in their lives—for better and for worse. The realistic stories chronicle the sweetness of long marriages and the lingering pain of death and divorce. In “A Taste of Dust,” selected for The Best American Short Stories 2005, a woman spends the day with her ex-husband and his wife. She wants to believe her husband is miserable, with his teenage daughters and younger wife who mock him, but her feelings of pity abruptly turn to self-pity as she leaves. In “Truthtelling,” a long-married couple rekindles their desire when they reveal their lies and indiscretions over the years. And in “The Golden Rule,” an O. Henry Prize winner, a widow contemplates whether she’s helping an unlikable elderly neighbor out of kindness or simply acquiescing to the “cunning tyranny of the weak” and whether this difference even matters. In the experimental stories, or fables, which evoke Lydia Davis loosened from logical precision, Schwartz, who's 81, dissect the human condition. These forays into fabulist situations—a minor actress is mistaken for a concert pianist and whisked off to a performance, a cabaret singer gives away her babies because they aren’t perfect enough, a woman lets her “Faux-Me” take over for a day—are deliciously absurd while also building to startling revelations. In “The Middle Child,” a woman suffering from depression forgets about her daughter, adopted while she was in the darkest hours of her illness. “Can you ever forgive me?” the narrator asks her child. “I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” the daughter answers, “and we wept.” Though the situations are unbelievable, the emotions are not.

Wise, wry, and witty—theses stories in all their stylistic variations are perfect.