Short stories make you long for more
Ehrhardt pens plots, characters that keep the readers guessing

By ELLISON G. WEIST

The Portland Tribune, Jul 3, 2007



In nearly every one of Pia Z. Ehrhardt's short stories, the women end up with the short end of the stick.

But thanks to Ehrhardt's gift for telling a story, even the most hypersensitive feminist won't bat an eye. They'll be too caught up in the characters and the plots in this debut collection, many of which unfold and flourish over the course of less than eight pages.

The best example of Ehrhardt's mesmerizing brevity is "The Man," a seven-page story that is both brilliant and sickening.

On the face of it, it is the story of a kidnapped woman who is tortured, raped and left for dead. But in spare, heart-rending prose it manages to focus on the relationship the victim hopes to cultivate with the young man who rescued her.

"The doctors had told her that morning that she'd be going home in a few days," Ehrhardt writes. "Lillian didn't know how to thank Doss. A proper thank-you would also be a good-bye and she didn't want to let Doss go. His daily visits were like her morphine."

Offbeat, often dysfunctional family situations abound in several of the stories.

"Running the Room" features a young married woman covering for her middle-age mother who is having an affair.

In "Tell Me in Italian," both the female narrator and her aging father are involved in adulterous relationships, but the father's appears to offer more hope for a future.

His daughter is left worrying about her married lover noting, "I want him to think about me while he sleeps, tossing, turning, and hope he and his small wife aren't tucked in, tight as snow peas."

Not all of Ehrhardt's characters are sympathetic, and that's a good thing.

Often her characters annoy us, like the celebrity-quoting woman in "Intermediate Goals" who starts her story by announcing why she left her husband: "I didn't leave him for another man. I left him for the next man, whom I will be sure to know better, who will know me better, whom I soon hope to meet."

By the end of her tale, we thank God she's not our sister, mother or wife but, boy howdy, it was fun reading about her.

In less than 170 pages Ehrhardt conveys pathos, humor, joy, anger and longing. This collection of short stories marks the author as a talented up-and-comer.

Labels: Birdsong

 

This review of FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES - and Robin Romm's short story collection, THE MOTHER GARDEN - was/still is one very sweet shock:

July 11, 2007
Books of The Times

Families Lost, and the Ties That Fray
By S. KIRK WALSH

"Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people," the author Tobias Wolff once said in a Paris Review interview. "Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not." A pair of new writers proves Mr. Wolff's point quite clearly with their debut short-story collections: In "The Mother Garden," Robin Romm explores the loss of a parent who dies young (in most cases, a mother) and in "Famous Fathers & Other Stories," Pia Z. Ehrhardt excavates sexual infidelities and unraveling marriages.

In Ms. Romm's impressive collection of 12 stories, a dead or dying parent is featured in 10 of them. And for the most part she delivers, offering surprising takes on the universal subject. The collection opens with "The Arrival," told from the perspective of Nina, a young woman spending a week with her dying mother and emotionally withdrawn father at a cottage on the rocky coastline of Oregon. "My mother's going to die," the story begins. "This is fact. And there are things that must be done. Last week she instructed us to donate her retirement savings." Hope for remission has long been dashed. "We've gone from hoping for miracle cures to just hoping the sandwiches are good," Nina says of their daily existence.

As is true with many of her stories, Ms. Romm skillfully introduces an element of whimsical surrealism that brings more life - and sadness - to her characters' experiences. In "The Arrival" a young stranger, Gracie, "an oversized Thumbelina," literally washes ashore, and her presence sets off a reach-for-the-Kleenex dynamic within this small family unit doing its best to prepare for pending death.

In the next story, "Lost and Found," a marginal father who had disappeared early in the narrator's life suddenly re-appears in the Arizona desert, naked, with a note that reads: "This is your father. Do as you will." The father moves in with his estranged daughter and settles "into the rhythms of cohabitation."

Their domestic tempo is thrown when the father begins to bring rowdy friends home from a garage where he has found a job. Rising tensions and unspoken disappointments eventually give way to further loss.

In the entertaining title story, the narrator undertakes an unusual experiment of creating a garden of "mothers" to replace the one she lost. "Laurel's the newest arrival," Ms. Romm writes. "She won't behave. 'Don't put me next to Agnes,' she says. 'That heifer.' 'That's mean,' I tell Laurel as I jam her feet into the tilled soil. Her kitten heels make good digging tools and I'm able to get her wedged in deep."

As is often the case with collections, not all the stories succeed. For example, Ms. Romm takes a stab at meta-fiction with "No Small Feat," in which the narrator becomes enraged that her boyfriend uses her dead-mother material to his own literary ends. Unfortunately, this lighthearted story doesn't serve the collection well. This reader prefers Ms. Romm's imaginative stories of mortality rather than a satirical take on her recurring theme.

The subject of loss shifts toward the romantic with Ms. Ehrhardt's collection. Her stories are heavily populated with characters engaging in empty, adulterous affairs that largely lead nowhere. The implicit sadness of these broken relationships resonates further with Ms. Ehrhardt's choice of setting: New Orleans, before the city itself became broken. The reader follows Ms. Ehrhardt's dispirited characters through the lively streets of the French Quarter. The scalloped rooftop of the Superdome perforates the horizon. Sisters jog along the scenic trails of the Tammany Trace.

Surprisingly, one of the less effective stories in this collection is "How It Floods," in which Ms. Ehrhardt takes Hurricane Katrina head-on, portraying an abusive triangle among a seductive woman (an incest survivor, the reader quickly learns), a civil engineer and his boss, hours before the levees break. The despair - of the characters and the city - loses its poignancy when the impending catastrophe takes center stage.

Ms. Ehrhardt's examination of affairs deepens when she brings two generations into these emotional entanglements. For example, in "Tell Me in Italian," Renny confronts her father, who is having an affair with an ex-student who is now a family friend while Renny is involved with her accountant, Mike, who is married with a son. "One part of me wants to compare notes with him, adulterer to adulteress, talk about the tastiness of stolen time, the clean slate for strange foods, intrepid vacations, untried positions ? because who wants the template of another couple's sex?" Ms. Ehrhardt writes from Renny's perspective. "I could talk for days if I forget my mother."

The collection's most successful story, "The Longest Part of the Day," moves between the point of view of 15-year-old Jilly, who goes missing when she takes a ride with Jimmy, the grocery bagger from Piggly Wiggly, and her mother, who is having an affair with her ex-husband's brother. Ms. Ehrhardt deftly captures the repercussions of a narcissistic mother caught in the undertow of her own desires, and the unexpected tenderness that surfaces between Jimmy and Jilly. It's quite amazing what Ms. Ehrhardt accomplishes in a mere 24 pages. It is, in short, a great story.

In "Running the Room," the complexity of mother-daughter relationships is also examined. Gail takes culinary-arts classes at a community college and dreams of opening a restaurant with her mother, who has become distracted by her affair with a city councilman, Eddie Royce. "Some nights I just drive around after class, roll down my windows to catch the sound of sprinklers or the smell of cooking through an open window, and try to see the world in some new way," Gail says about the time before she retrieves her mother from her meetings with Eddie. "Sometimes it works."

With both these collections, the authors offer glimpses into new ways of seeing the world as they write about their chosen subject matter - and sometimes it works.

S. Kirk Walsh is a fiction writer in Austin, Tex.

Labels: Birdsong