LOVE LIKE THAT

Young women glimpse men’s baffling behavior and discover their own.

In this debut collection, which includes two Pushcart Prize–winning stories, Duffy-Comparone’s female protagonists are betwixt and between. They’re teenage girls not yet experienced enough to know the difference between abuse and affection, girls who unwittingly thrill to lecherous male attention. They’re young women dating dramatically older men who like the idea better than the reality. They’re childless women moving in with men who are fathers and finding themselves jealous of their boyfriends’ offspring. The world is bewildering, in part because of the mysterious nature of love. That’s the case for Anita in “The Zen Thing,” who is having an affair with a man her parents’ age and trying to reconcile two very different feelings: that she has totally ruined her life and that she loves a multitude of things about her boyfriend, not least of which is that “he looks good in everything.” Elsewhere, it’s the inexplicable nature of physical desire. In “Marvel Sands,” the 15-year-old narrator thinks she wants her 60-year-old boss to “touch [her]” even though he repeatedly invades her personal space and insults her intelligence. There are allusions to other iconic short stories here—Lorrie Moore’s “Terrific Mother” and Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance?” come to mind, and Duffy-Comparone’s characters are the offspring of both: emotionally flattened while also capable of sharp, witty thoughts. (Braces, one character observes, “made a wet, tragic thing of consonants.”) This combination is devastating in “The Offering,” the collection’s standout story, about a little girl trying to navigate her parents’ separation and her mother’s emotional abuse. You’ll want to cry at the end when you learn what the girl sacrifices to try to control a situation that is completely out of her hands.

Well-crafted, emotionally stirring work.