Authentic stories reveal the tough, urgent world of girls
Yet for all their gloom and doom, these stories have a curious power. They sound utterly authentic; Orringer hardly ever misjudges a scene or a line of dialogue. Often told in the continuing present ("The heel of Tessa's left shoe is coming loose," etc.), the stories unfold with a kind of inevitability even as they surprise you with final scenes of shocking urgency: a young woman scrabbling in the dirt to recover her hastily concealed drugs, or a teenager thwarting a misguided elopement with a pistol.
Such scenes may make you think that this is not the book for a light-hearted late-summer excursion to the beach, and that's true: You want to read "How to Breathe Underwater" when you have some time to reflect, to reread certain passages and to think about what it was like to be a child. But there is much to make the reader smile, too, in Orringer's felicitous turns of phrase and in the just-right tone of her narrative. One hefty teenager, saddled with a cousin named Aida who is an exquisitely beautiful model, is asked what she thinks of the lovely but mean-spirited cousin:
"She's had a hard past,' I say, in an attempt at magnanimity. Because if I answered the question with honesty, I would blast Aida to Turkmenistan. All our lives, she has understood her advantage over me and has exercised it at every turn. When I pass her billboard in town I can feel her gleeful disdain."
Orringer's powers of description allow her to sketch a scene with vivid economy. We see young Jewish girls in long skirts, cooling off on a hot day by wading into a lake where "tiny fish flash around our legs like sparks." We accompany another family to Disney World, where "the air smelled of funnel cakes and French fries and Coppertone, and underneath it all was the green mildewy smell of Orlando, the thick tropical humidity you had to work hard to breathe."
The emotional landscape of these stories is more wrenching, however. In the Orlando story, "What We Save," the young protagonist's mother is dying of cancer and arranging a last reunion with her girlhood sweetheart with the last of her strength: "Helena looked at her mother asleep on the bed, her arms bruised from blood draws and injections, and felt as if her own chest were being crushed to a tiny knot."
In "The Isabel Fish," the story that provides the collection's title, a teenaged girl — the survivor of a watery car crash in which another girl, Isabel, drowns — tries to cope with survivor's guilt by taking scuba-diving lessons and by coming to terms with her brother (who was in love with Isabel). The protagonist, who loves her pet fish, muses: "Tonight, for the first time, I'll begin to know what my fish have known all their lives: how to breathe underwater."
One of the best stories, "Note to Sixth-Grade Self," is written as if a series of auto-reminders by a girl who's being cruelly ostracized ("Order the fries. Don't even bother trying to sit with Patricia and Cara. If they won't let you, try to sit with Andrea Shaw. And if Andrea Shaw gets up and throws away the rest of her fries rather than sit with you, sit alone and do not look at anyone. Particularly not the boys").
It's not surprising to discover that Orringer herself was the subject of such ostracism as an outsider — Jewish and wearing a corrective eye patch — in Louisiana, where she was certainly a crawfish out of water. Nor will the reader be surprised to learn that Orringer has firsthand acquaintance with the illness and death of a parent; her mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer when the author was 10.
These early traumas may have helped shape Orringer's world view, in which the passage through childhood and puberty is strewn with dangers and roadblocks. But what she does with those hazards in her stories is something altogether magical. Like all good short stories, these make you yearn for novels.