Book Review: Readings

What's Come Over You?

Delphinium Books, 224 pp., $23

It's clear that Marian Thurm spends a great deal of her time eavesdropping. Her stories are filled with comments she must have overheard, and a varied cast of characters that she might have bumped into on the streets of her home, New York City. Nonetheless, the characters in What's Come Over You?, Thurm's third book of short stories (she has also published four novels) have two traits in common: a wry sense of humor, and the sense that they are alone in the world.

Take the narrator of the first story, "Moonlight." He is a rabbi whose wife has just stepped up to the microphone during Friday night services and announced, "Regrettably, the rabbi and I are splitting up, effective immediately." The rabbi is left to wrestle with the absence of his wife, Francee, and the attentions of members of his congregation like Jamie, a teenager who consoles the rabbi by saying, "I was real sorry to hear your wife ditched you. Bummer, huh?"

Like the rabbi, the narrator of "Pleasure Palace" has also been left alone, but by the death of her beloved husband. While grieving and carrying on with the construction of a bathroom renovation she had planned with her husband, she notes, "It took me a while to realize it, but the quality of the construction job in my fabulous new bathroom began to deteriorate as soon as the contractor broke up with his lover, who happened to be my hairdresser."

In fact, of the 13 stories in Thurm's collection, eight explore the lives of characters whose spouses are cheating on them or have left them, and four explore the loss of recent widows and widowers. There is only one story that does not delve into the details of an ended marriage, and that story is "Recent History," about a gay man whose female great love is about to marry someone else.

Loss and betrayal are powerful themes, and Thurm explores them carefully. At times, her flippant language left me nonplussed, as when a 10-year-old girl named Daphne says, "Okay okay okay, I'm sorry I said you were the meanest and the worst. Can I borrow some of your lipstick and stuff?" By filling her characters' lives with hilarious moments, there are times when Thurm loses out on really moving her audiences. It is a little harder to feel sorry for the rabbi, to be truly rooting for him, when you're laughing at him as well. Thurm's characters are varied and hurting, and yet the stories remain cheerful. While none of the stories in What's Come Over You? thrill, they're certainly enjoyable. I plan on eavesdropping more often.