If prudence allowed, I would populate this review with nothing but
passages from Lucy Corin’s mesmerizing collection of stories, The
Entire Predicament. My notes are filled with sentences and
paragraphs that beg to be shared, but my job requires more than rote
reproductions of Corin’s delicious prose. For demonstrative purposes,
allow me one, from “My Favorite Dentist”: “My insurance covers
everything but a dollar, which I pay in quarters over a smooth white
countertop. Then I drive toward home through the drizzle, feeling my
teeth. The sky is an unrumpled gray. Home is not far but it takes a
long time with all the lights. Also, because of the sniper, a lot of
people are trying to drive with their heads ducked.”
Corin begins the paragraph with the banalities of insurance copays
(however oddly covered by loose change) and post-cleaning dental
sensations. The atmosphere is summarily rendered, and we get a traffic
report before the narrator shrugs off a few words about “the sniper,”
as if an invisible assassin was as ordinary as a left exit. Then, she
concludes with a terrific image of busy thoroughfares, where cars
appear to drive themselves, humans hunched and cowering inside.
Nearly every page of The Entire Predicament packs this sort
of efficient wallop, where an economy of words lulls the reader into a
false sense of the quotidian, only to be casually shanghaied with
devastating information. Corin’s characters have a hard time in the
world: They obsessively report adulterers to cuckolded spouses, birth
babies with “bendy bones,” and organize their neuroses while bound and
gagged in empty homes.
Corin’s loaded, minimal prose has earned her comparisons to short
story masters Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis. I was also reminded of
Miranda July and Julie Hecht’s stories, where worrisome protagonists
exist tenuously on their skittish instincts.
As for our dental patient, who finally makes her way home through
the traffic: She’s greeted by her neighbor, Andrea, who plans to elude
the sniper by walking everywhere zigzag. “Andrea explains to me that
the whole reason she’s home is her boss gave everyone the day off
because he and his wife decided to keep their kids out of school and
just, you know, ‘value them,’ and he thought everyone should go home
and do the same. So Andrea’s home freaking out with her plants, and she
wants some company.” And so the story begins.