A Perfect Stranger, by Roxana Robinson is a collection of short stories by this author of Sweetwater along with two other novels, two short story collections, and a biography of Georgia O’Keefe, four of which have been named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. I was most anxious to read this as Ms. Robinson had been one of the instructors at the Wesleyan Writers Conference I attended.
The first story, A Family Christmas, is written in the first person pov and tells of a girl and her family’s visits to their father’s father’s home for the holidays. There is a wonderful homey sense about Robinson’s writing, and though this is not perhaps the best example of her exacting imagery, I sort of liked it. It is the meeting of their dog, Huge with the vastly disliked Tweenie, dog in residence:
Huge had come inside, and now held his plumy tail tensely up in the air, his head high and wary. Tweenie, Grandmere’s horrible black-and-white mongrel, snake-snouted, sleek-sided, plump and disagreeable, appeared in the doorway behind her. The two dogs approached eah other, stiff-legged, slit-eyed, flat-eared. They began to rumble, deep in their throats. (p. 7)
Robinson’s voice has almost an old-fashioned properness that tells us of the situation of wealth and refinement within the description of the grandparent’s home, yet in a vivid memory of childish wonder and rationalized comprehension. We are drawn into Joanna’s world and her view of it as she tells us what is going on around her and we get the feel of it:
The rules of entry and exclusion from the Park were mysterious to us; they were part of the larger unknowable world which our parents moved through but which we did not understand. It was like the struggle to learn a language, listening hard for words and idioms and phrases, being constantly mystified and uncomprehanding, knowing that all around us, in smooth and fluent use by the rest of the world, was a vast and intricate system we could not yet grasp. (p. 5)
In retrospect, the above is subtle foreshadowing of the events that will build into the major conflict of the story, that is of the appearance of one of the hired help in a drunken and bold verbal attack on Joanna’s grandfather, as well as the mysterious appearance of a little girl about Joanna’s age that the children spy in the kitchen as they lunch.
The story introduces Joanna to the social differences between the family and the hired help as the events build to a confrontation, and there is another parallel story that her father is relating to his parents about a woman who has created a daycare on her own though with no money of her own, yet refuses his offer of assistance via a grant he has applied for. The themes of misunderstanding between generations as well as social classes is what I believe Ms. Robinson is highlighting in this story, and cleverly showing it through the eyes of a child.
Very nice writing, precise and yet lyrical, with all elements of story intact.
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