A JEWELER’S EYE FOR FLAW

The winner of this year’s Associated Writing Programs Award for short fiction is a hit on all counts.

First-timer Hodgen breaks nine stories into parts I and II. Who knows why, and who cares? Sadness and skill pervade her tales, the fantastic is laced through with the realistic, and solid human feeling is always the goal. In the title story, a young woman contends with the tedium of suburbia, with a mother who insists on speaking to her children through teddy bears, and with a father who has run off to detox centers in the East. Though the boy next door won’t take off his ghost costume, the narrator feels inexplicably attracted to his silent asceticism. Lilting, dreamlike “Take Them In, Please” delineates a young woman’s first expedition into the larger world of possibility, medical students, and life on her own. “Three Parting Shots and a Forecast,” an amusing piece of alternative history, reexplores the assassination of Lincoln with plenty of artistic and humorous license. In “Going Out of Business Forever,” an odd patriarch looming over twin daughters manages a tenuous grip on control and sanity as Christmas approaches the small town they all haunt. A brother and sister escape to Graceland in “The Hero of Loneliness,” headed first for the concrete world of fame and then for the cloudier world of metaphysics. Characters in a couple of tales reappear and merge with those in others, demonstrating not only the author’s skill, but her ambition. Hodgen tends to overdescribe and overpopulate her worlds, a flaw that suggests she’s growing out of the confines of the short form. There’s a good novel waiting to be shaped by her unique voice and vision: zany, smart, humane.

Fine stories and flexible prose promise greater things to come.