The Sum of Their Parts: Linked Stories

What's so appealing about a collection of linked short stories? For fans of the form, they have the added benefit of getting to spend more time with an especially well-fleshed out character. For novel lovers, such a collection comes close to having the depth and expansiveness of a full-length work. Each story can be read independently, yet together they add to more than the sum of the individual parts. Sometimes their setting links the stories. In other stories, the link is a character. Here are some particularly good examples of the genre.

The characters that cross paths in the 11 stories of David Schickler's KISSING IN MANHATTAN (Dial: Dell. 2001. ISBN 0-385-33566-0. $21.95; pap. Delta: Dell. 2002. ISBN 0-385-33567-9. $12.95; LJ 7/01) all live in the Preemption, a fabulous Gothic apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and frequent the same hip restaurants. Three—a beautiful travel writer, a Wall Street ladies' man, and his shy roommate—play central roles in six of the tales. Fans of well-written fiction will love these humorous, tragic, unsettling, and moving stories (many of which appeared in The New Yorker and Zoetrope).

Less detective than African folk heroine, the delightfully intuitive Mma Precious Ramotswe, the proprietor of THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor: Doubleday. 2003. ISBN 1-4000-3477-9. pap. $11.95) helps friends, neighbors, and relatives in rural Botswanna by using her own brand of wisdom. These domestic cases range from lost husbands, imposters, and daughters with secret boyfriends to a sometimes-incompetent doctor. In a series of 22 vignettes, she neatly raps up each case, each brief story revealing another facet of both Africa and Precious Ramotswe. This most engaging gem is followed up by Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, and The Kalahari Typing School for Men.

Edgy, oftentimes surreal, internal and external violence shades the life of Amelia, the main character of Anna Burns's NO BONES (Norton. 2002. ISBN 0-393-32303-X. pap. $13.95; LJ 4/15/02). We meet her as a young schoolgirl during Northern Ireland's "Troubles" of the 1970s, but war-torn Belfast often pales when contrasted with the violence in Amelia's school and home. These are not typical coming-of-age stories: Amelia's troubles (anorexia, alcoholism, sexual violence, and more) are brilliantly observed in Burns's unique voice. The scenes set at school are especially vivid: Amelia is instructed to write a poem about peace, and the teacher threatens to "multiple-slap anybody who didn't get it right."

In DISAPPEARING INGENUE: THE MISADVENTURES OF ELEANOR STODDARD by Melissa Pritchard (Doubleday. 2002. ISBN 0-385-50303-2. $23.95), we soon discover that Eleanor Stoddard's life is not on a clear or expected track, but that quirkiness works just fine in this collection of eight interrelated stories that follow Eleanor from childhood to middle-aged adulthood. Locations change (she lives on the East Coast and suddenly pops up in suburban Chicago), careers are fuzzy, she is either married or a widow, and mother to children who quickly grow up; even names change from Eleanor to Nora and back to Eleanor. These stories—spare and surprising—are memorable reads.

Set against the beautiful but rugged backdrop of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Alistair MacLeod's ISLAND: THE COMPLETE STORIES (Norton. 2001. ISBN 0-393-05035-l. $25.95; pap. Vintage. 2002. ISBN 0-375-71304-2. $14.95; LJ 1/01) feature observant and honest portrayals of human behavior, often examining the contrast of rural and city life and providing a lovely elegy to a lost time. The island itself is a vivid character, and it is hard to leave this remarkable locale at the end of the last story.

Elizabeth, the narrator of Isabel Huggan's THE ELIZABETH STORIES (o.p.), doesn't fit into her family or her narrow-minded small town in 1950s Canada. She is an adolescent with an amazing capacity for "sins"—carelessness, showing off, arrogance: in short, innate badness—that bring on trouble. At least, this is the view of her ineffective parents (with whom she is always at odds) and who don't understand her imaginative, lusty nature. Elizabeth is a fully realized, complex character, and the beautifully written stories reflect her capacity for growth. One can only hope that Huggan, who now lives in France, will bring Elizabeth back.

Julie Hecht, a New Yorker contributor and O. Henry Prize winner, is an engaging female combination of Woody Allen and David Sedaris. Her nine tales in DO THE WINDOWS OPEN? (Penguin. 1998. ISBN 0-14-027145-7. pap. $12.95) are narrated by an unnamed neurotic character in her 40s who is obsessed with the random and mundane details of life—fertility clinics, hairpieces, opticians who might be ex-Nazis, buses with windows that don't open, and more. No detail of her life is too odd to report. These are wonderfully comic stories told in a unique voice.

Feisty, red-headed Rhoda Manning, a recurring character in Ellen Gilchrist's oeuvre (she's appeared in five short-story collections and one novel) is the author's most captivating and complex creation. She's featured to perfection in RHODA: A LIFE IN STORIES (Little, Brown. 1995. ISBN 0-316-31464-l. pap. $15.95; LJ 9/1/95). The Southern charm drips, and in an introduction by Gilchrist, we learn that Rhoda is a mirror of herself, at least some of the time.