Book Review: Other People We Married

Title: Other People We Married
Author: Emma Straub
Format: trade paperback
Publisher: Five Chapters
Pub Date: Jan 2011
Read: Mar 2011
Purchased: Jan 2011, at the Launch Party at BookCourt
Why: I first discovered Emma Straub via twitter. She is, if you didn’t already know, one of the nicest authors in the twitterverse and in real life too it would seem.
Fulfills Challenge? yes (3)
Notes: N/A
Review/Thoughts:
So here’s the deal — I wanted to like this collection a lot more than I actually did.

I feel the collection can basically be summed up in the following way: unhappy people in unhappy relationships doing very little to change their unhappy circumstances. In some ways I suppose this is a reflection of life. How often do people really do anything to change their circumstances? I can appreciate that to some extent, however, I also began to feel the stories ended too soon (perhaps because very little had changed over the course of the story). Most of them seemed to be lacking that essential moment that makes for a really good short story. The moment where our perception of the situation changes along with the character’s or a gun goes off without warning shocking the reader from their place of complacency. These stories didn’t really have much of that. This is a quiet, somewhat sullen collection of stories, most of which aren’t very memorable because there seems to be a single underlying situation in all of them (meaning they all start to blend together after a while).

Oh, that sounds so much harsher than intended. Let’s move on to some of the positives. The writing is solid, deceptively simple and straightforward. I enjoyed “Pearls” and “Fly-Over State” the most, and I was happy to see the collection end on a more positive note with “Hot Springs Eternal.” I’d be interested in seeing recurring character, Franny Gold, appear in more stories (preferably without her jerk of a husband). I also think Straub’s writing is good enough to check out future works of hers. Her novel was picked up by Riverhead Books, so we’ll probably be seeing that sometime next year. I’ll give it a go if the plot seems interesting.

Straub’s style has been compared to Lorrie Moore’s so perhaps fans of Lorrie Moore should give this a try. I haven’t actually read Moore, so I can’t properly judge. Just throwing it out there.

Final Verdict: