THE TYPING LADY

Longing and loss sometimes lead to understanding in this reflective collection of 11 short pieces.

Taking Elizabeth Bishop’s keening poem “One Art” as her epigraph (and one story’s title), Ozeki shows people struggling with losses past, present, and future. Some tales offer retrospective glimpses of key episodes in a character’s life. “The Anthropologist’s Kid” poignantly contrasts the eponymous narrator’s recollection of the ugly breakup of his childhood friendship with a half-Filipina girl with the happy memory of the day they met and bonded. The narrator of “One Art” looks back at 1978 to remember how she was shaped as a writer and a woman by her brief but intense undergraduate relationship with a female visiting scholar. That narrator directs our attention to “the gaps and elisions where the real story hides,” which are key elements in Ozeki’s strategy to keep readers off balance. Plain prose with enigmatic undercurrents is also part of that strategy; “Dead Beat Poet” and “Where Ambition Goes to Die” lay out surreal scenarios with deadpan matter-of-factness. So is Ozeki’s playful insertion of details from her own life into clearly fictional scenarios; “fiction” is a flexible word here. Some stories immerse readers in a character’s present-day struggles. In “Leafblower,” the impoverished poetry MFA pilfering books from the elderly couple renting her a room finds herself becoming their caretaker as the wife succumbs to dementia. The unnamed author in “The Problem of the Body” schemes with her 17-year-old granddaughter to avoid a book tour while looking back at the premature death of her daughter—the girl’s mother—and the recent loss of her husband, grievously mourned. “Stories,” Ozeki muses in “The Typing Lady: An Author’s Note,” “are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.” This warmth toward the fiction-making process—and her characters—leavens the collection’s generally sad atmosphere.

Tender, mysterious, and moving.