BOOK REVIEW : ‘Dark’: A Rose Among Many Thorns

Dark Continent and Other Stories by Laura Kalpakian (Viking: 259 pages; $17.95.)

As much as they might not like to think about it, many writers end up being known by a single novel, a single poem, a single story. (One thinks of James Baldwin, who wrote, and wrote, and wrote, through a long, distinguished life. But more and more people use only one story of his as a password: “You’ve read ‘Sonny’s Blues’? Wow! Amazing! How do you think he could have put a whole world like that into something like 30, 40 pages?”)

If Laura Kalpakian gets her due, she’ll be justly remembered and duly revered for one incredible story, not even the title one, found in these pages. “Bones of Contention,” a 47-page journey into psychological hell, challenges even Pete Dexter’s prize-winning novel, “Paris Trout.” The prose in this story is at once unbearable and unbelievably beautiful. The beginning sentence, “He was not my real father and I did not love him,” sets the stage for domestic horror, lost love, abandonment after abandonment, controlled desperation, and the way that one family, living out in the middle of an American nowhere, can embody absolutely everything that’s wrong with contemporary American life.

And in that same “ordinary American family,” in absolutely unsentimental terms, Kalpakian can find the power of the human spirit, which miraculously, transcendently, endures and prevails. “Bones of Contention,” the story of a daughter of divorce whose mother is a beautiful monster, whose “real” father rejects her again and again and whose new stepfather, an emotionally scarred Vietnam vet, tries as hard as the kid does to hold their new, jerry-built family together. To anyone in the movie business who is reading this review: Send someone in the office out for Laura Kalpakian’s new collection of short stories. “Bones of Contention” has Academy Award movie written all over it.

But here’s the puzzling part of this new collection. If “Bones of Contention” is one of the finest stories in the language, some of the others here are frightfully bad-- Embarrassing is the best word to describe them. “Wine Women and Song” takes as its time period the days just after World War II, when “our boys” were returning. In a San Diego duplex, two women--an Armenian mother, next door a wife transplanted from Idaho--wait, respectively, for son and husband. The Armenian son is all right (except that he wants to use the G.I. Bill to go to college), but the Idaho husband is a fundamentalist Christian blob who insists on eating mashed potatoes with cream sauce and asks rhetorical questions like: “Why would you want to stay in a town that’s crawling with spics and wops and chinks and jazz-bos?”

The trouble with a sentence like that is that people don’t talk that way, any more than a girl down at the defense plant would open her mouth to utter these words: “Let the men make the moolah. Let the girls make whoopee! . . . From now on I’m going to sit on my hams and put my feet up and eat bonbons.” These fictional figures are pawns in Kalpakian’s chess game: She’s got a point she wants to establish, she’ll murder the language and her characters in order to get that point across.

Some of these stories, including the glorious “Bones of Contention,” are set in the California town of St. Elmo, which reveals an uncanny resemblance to the spooky town of Thermal. These desert stories are good. And strange. You do want to read more. But then Kalpakian drags you off to London for a story about a spinster who reads antique cookbooks, and, by making a Christmas cordial, becomes a vessel of living history. Well, OK. Then you turn the page and you’re back in St. Elmo again. It’s like making your bed, and sticking a bicycle under the pillow, and cracking raw eggs on the quilt. It just doesn’t work. But “Bones of Contention” is a masterpiece, and should be remembered forever. Go figure.