CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE

A second collection from Iowa Short Fiction Prize–winner Searle (A Four-Sided Bed, 1998, not reviewed): five stories and a novella centering on two subjects not often linked: family and exhibitionism.

In the eponymous novella, a 29-year-old actress named Kathryn becomes a local celebrity in Lowell, Massachusetts, when she’s scouted for the role of skating star Nancy Kerrigan in a TV drama. Meanwhile, teenager Daniel tacks posters of himself over those announcing Kathryn’s upcoming one-woman show at the Lowell Auditorium. Daniel is obsessed with the concept of celebrity, and with Kathryn as object of desire. Kathryn, whose excitement about the Kerrigan role is mitigated by her guilt over embarrassing her mentally handicapped sister in a TV promotion, unwittingly helps Daniel satisfy both his obsessions—with devastating consequences. Searle deftly slides between her two protagonists, showing the wobbly boundary between Kathryn’s normal, if slightly neurotic, ambitions and Daniel’s more twisted craving. The majority of the remaining tales deal with intellectually superior young women whose hunger for attention gets them in trouble. In “Memoir of a Soon-to-Be Star,” a young girl pretends not to know that her retarded brother is watching as she takes an exaggeratedly sensual shower. A graduate student closing up her dead aunt’s house (in “What It’s Worth”) flirts condescendingly with the hunky moving-man she’s hired. The protagonist of “101” allows herself to be photographed by her teacher as she’s having virtual intercourse with the teacher’s husband. Sex is less central in these stories than the need to be desired and the power it offers as substitute for love. The final piece, “Celebration,” about a couple trying to have a child, seems slightly out of place after so much dark neediness, though it’s linked to the collection’s leitmotif of less-mentally-able family members.

Searle’s Ivy League eroticism is only mildly disturbing in the stories, but her novella demands attention for its nuance as well as its wallop.