The First Hurt

In a highly promising debut collection of stories, Sherman writes of alienated lower-end white suburbia in a manner that shifts perspectives with an effortlessness that mitigates her characters' sad stuckness. In the opener, "The Reaper," Beth's assignment for a high school psych class—correspond with a soldier stationed abroad—yields not only the expected ("SEND ME A PICTURE OF YOUR NAKED TITS," he writes, claiming to be possessed by the title figure), but an ending reasserts her fantasies of her future with a starkly intimate tenderness. In the tale that follows, an already bad marriage is pushed to the breaking point by having children (twins with birth or genetic defects—it's deliberately left unsaid), by the hot neighbor girl (with intentionally stereotyped hot black boyfriend) and by other facts of life in a nascent exurb; there, everyone's longings feel as shoddily and provisionally housed as the denizens themselves. By the time one reaches the last story, the weirdly anachronistic, cross-cultural sex-with-spinster tale, "Jewish Hair," one has given up any resistance to Sherman's grotesques and settled all the way in to a very uncomfortable place. (May)