cover image The Prisoner Pear

The Prisoner Pear

Elissa Minor Rust, . . Ohio Univ./Swallow, $28.95 (193pp) ISBN 978-0-8040-1078-8

In 12 efficient, accomplished stories inspired by snippets from the Lake Oswego, Ore., police blotter, Rust takes a magnifying glass to affluent suburban life in the Pacific Northwest. In the title story, a young UPS manager looks for signs that he should propose to his rich girlfriend while battling a case of cold feet and class anxiety. A blotter item about two high school girls thought to be prostitutes (in fact, they're just standing on a corner, waiting for a cab) blossoms into a perceptive and moving story about best friends united—and ultimately divided—by their severe eating disorders. Economics drive a young father to enroll himself in risky medical experiments in "Rich Girls"; in "Of All the Insatiable Human Urges," a 36-year-old woman discovers she's pregnant shortly after learning that her 49-year-old husband is dying of prostate cancer; and in "Moon over Water," an unnatural sequence of full moons wreaks havoc in the Portland area. Solid, believable characters rendered in careful, deliberate prose move against a convincing landscape of lakeside cottages and sprawling McMansions, grocery store aisles and shopping malls, bedrooms and doctors' offices. This is a fine portrait of privileged lives, in all their mundanity and weirdness. (Dec.)