Pittsburgh
Review by David Starkey
When it’s really working, the short story is, word-for-word, the most satisfying of the literary genres. A successful short story has all the punch of a great lyric poem, with the narrative frisson we associate with a good novel. Happily for readers, Kelly Sather’s Small in Real Life, winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, offers up nine strong stories, each one a little miracle of compression and surprise.
The book’s epigraph, by Sam Shepherd, is dated “7/27/81, Los Angeles, Ca.” and more or less identifies the territory Sather will cover in her short fiction: “people here / have become / the people / they’re pretending to be.” The stories are mostly set in California, and mostly in and around LA, and there’s a definite sense that the characters’ adopted personas can be as ensnaring as they are freeing.
That said, the range of experiences described is wide. In “Harmony,” a paparazzo serves his court-ordered detox before going to prison in a snazzy Malibu facility populated by movie stars and musicians with their own problems, and their own “higher powers.” The protagonist’s “higher power was an eagle roosting in the center of his forehead, squatting in the middle of his third eye. Nesting there, digging its talons into his brain.”
“Handbag Parade” is about Stephanie and Carol’s visits to their friend Gia, who is dying of ALS and can only communicate by blinking. Former “script girls,” the three women now lead vastly different lives, with Carol married to a well-known director, Stephanie just scraping by on odd jobs, while Gia is “alive inside a frozen woman doll, like a Stephen King horror story in reverse.” The story is told from Stephanie’s perspective, and Sather does a superb job of allowing us to sympathize with Stephanie while also suggesting that she is a far from admirable human being.
Another story, “Toucan,” centers on a protagonist who has an unsettled relationship with a dying friend. Beautiful and rich Lulu and everywoman Carrie were best friends during their senior year in college, but now Lulu is in her final days, no longer looking like herself: “The cancer medicines had bloated her face, softened her.” The two are no longer friends, but for some reason Lulu has asked that Carrie spend the night with her and two of Lulu’s friends in Lulu’s parents’ Malibu beach house. It’s nothing but awkwardness and regrets and cringy conversations, with Sather demonstrating a remarkable knack for transporting readers to a particular place then making them feel extremely uncomfortable.
In general, things don’t end well for the characters, who do, indeed, turn out to be “small in real life.” They make poor life choices and the consequences are sad and depressing and, in at least one instance, deadly. Of course we don’t always know everyone’s exact fates becauseSather has the necessary short story writer’s gift of pulling away from the scene at the most poignant moment; whether or not that exit point reveals every last outcome of an irresponsible decision doesn’t matter.
One final kudo for Small in Real Life and its publisher, the University of Pittsburgh Press. The book was clearly selected for the excellence of its work rather than the glamour of the magazines where the stories were originally published. No New Yorker or Paris Review is listed in the Acknowledgements. Instead, Sather’s stories appeared in smaller journals like the Pembroke Review and Ascent and The Southampton Review, which have excellent reputations among those who actively seek out exciting new work, but which may be unknown to most readers. However, good work will find an audience, and Kelly Sather deserves all the praise she has lately been receiving.
