The Vanishing Princess

The dozen stories of this excellent posthumous collection look at isolation, anxiety, sex, the roles women play, and the attempts of men to define those roles, all from a female perspective. Three stories feature fairy tale heroines: two princesses confined to towers, one miller’s daughter tasked with spinning straw into gold. The title story’s vanishing princess never asks about the world outside her tower. As the narrator explains, no one told the princess curiosity was a quality worth cultivating. A passing soldier brings food, and then another soldier brings a mirror. Etching the princess’s likeness onto the mirror, the soldiers create what Diski (1947–2016) calls the earliest example of cubist art. In “Leaper,” two women meet after another woman throws herself under a train. The budding relationship ends when one of the two women, a writer suffering doubts about her own writing skill, has reservations about her newfound friend. Some stories depict growing up in a disjointed, unloving family. In “My Brother Stanley,” a girl knows her dead half-brother only from photographs and a portrait. “Strictempo” shows a teenager expelled from school, abandoned by her parents, living in a mental health facility where dancing offers respite from thinking. Diski’s protagonists include ordinary women with unusual interior lives. In “Housewife,” Susan Donohoe indulges in wild sex fantasies during her affair with an English lecturer. One protagonist imagines the perfect bath; another obsesses over whether Mount Rushmore exists. Diski displays hard-edged humor, incisive perceptions, and a lively imagination. (Dec.)