BLUE AND OTHER STORIES
by William Young
The subtle rules and rituals of relationships are unveiled in these quietly penetrating stories.
Young’s yarns capture ordinary Americans in moments of stress and resolution that change their attitudes toward marriage, love, and life. Tales include the following: A man takes boxing lessons and deploys them against his wife’s lover; a Harvard graduate student engages in a game of mutual exhibitionism with a neighbor through a window, which falters when he encounters her in a bookstore; a dad becomes fascinated with a 13-year-old neighbor girl’s lesbian affair with a classmate; a young woman arriving in San Francisco meets the playboy scion of a famous painter on a nude beach and accompanies him back to his yacht; a formerly homeless woman picks up a currently homeless man on the beach in Venice, California; a Mexican American English professor in Los Angeles is drawn to a splendidly manly actor brimming with alt-right conspiracy theories; and a four-story cycle tracks a young man growing up in the 1960s from a high school romance to young adulthood as he withers under a failing marriage and an agonizing job as a door-to-door cookware salesman under the shadow of the Vietnam War. Young’s protagonists are adrift and dissatisfied, full of ruminations about their lives and larger political and racial tensions, and they’re usually pretty horny and avid for sex as a transformative or at least edifying experience. His spare, clear prose is raptly observant of mundane moments (“He wanted to know more about her—but having already said goodbye twice, no doubt starting up once more would strike the girl as odd, or aggressive”). But in lyrical passages, he conveys a sense of something grander underlying the everyday (“She laid out the bedroll, opened the wine, and watched as the light from the sunset curved and spread throughout the valley, like the hand of a god”). Young’s characters are steeped in confusion, but the collection is lit with a painful awareness and yearning that make them fascinating.
A richly textured, engrossing collection of tales about people discovering who and why they love.