BALLOON THEATER

People search for meaning in Cairo, Buffalo, and beyond in Street’s debut collection of stories and essays.

The author, who died in 2012, left behind an impressive body of short fiction, which is assembled here along with a number of personal essays. Several of the stories are set in Egypt, where Street taught for four years at the American University in Cairo. In one, a couple from New York on the verge of a breakup share a cafe with a corpse wrapped in a white sheet. In another, an Egyptian tennis instructor is baffled by his American student, and not just because neither of them speaks the other’s language. A Ptolemy-obsessed English instructor heads to a desert oasis despite the impending war to visit a famed oracle from antiquity. An expat diving instructor checks out other expats on a scuba expedition in the Red Sea, as Street describes with his typical dry humor: “He’d chatted with the Californian enough already to have learned her state of origin, but he didn’t like to hit on a woman until he knew they both wouldn’t be stuck on the same boat the next day.” There are also stories set back home in America: A grad student works in a laundromat, a bully visits one of his victims who has recently been in a car accident, a man teaches a boy he’s never met how to fish. The book concludes with eight personal essays, many of them about Street’s life in Obama-era Buffalo, New York (he discusses such topics as the elderly, opinionated neighbor that he begrudgingly befriends and his experiences taking the bus) as well as a few miscellaneous pieces on Russia and life in academia. As Don Eron writes in his introduction to the collection, “Street doesn’t give instructions about how to live, or preach that he has a better idea. All he does is report from the front.”

Street is full of brilliant observations about expat life. One American in Cairo, preparing for a party he doesn’t want to attend, thinks, “It would be no worse than he’d expected: another strained expat evening, everybody trying to make up for the impermanence of their circle with the intensity of their delight in and concern for each other.” The line appears in the title story, one of the collection’s strongest. It follows a language instructor bent on leaving Egypt; he is planning to break up with his girlfriend, only to learn something unexpected about her past romantic life that causes him to interfere with another couple’s engagement. Street is a shrewd observer of human personality: “After all, he’d come eight thousand miles for her sake, professing cultural curiosity, but she knew better,” a woman observes of her boyfriend. “Marty wouldn’t cross a street unless he knew what he wanted on the other side.” Though the stories are better than the essays (which arguably prolong the book unnecessarily), there’s a hard-earned wisdom and quiet craftsmanship to all of Street’s pieces, making it difficult for the reader to ever tire of them.

A varied but reliably compelling collection of prose.