Writing in Limbo

Lily Tuck tries to get us from here to there

By John Freeman

Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived Short stories by Lily Tuck; HarperCollins. New York; $22.95, 170 pages.

For a fiction writer, Lily Tuck has a rather charming affinity for using subtitles. Her first novel, Interviewing Matisse, came tagged with, “or, the Woman Who Died Standing Up,” while her third, Siamý a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award, had this caveat: “or, the Woman Who Shot a Man.” There are multiple ways of seeing the world, these two-tiered titles suggest to the reader, an attitude that pervades Tuck’s latest, sterling collection of short stories: Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived. (Harper)

The women who people these stories are in transit. Whether waiting at an airport for a second husband or bunking down for a July holiday in the south of France, Limbo brings to life characters who are dislocated, struggling to get from the “here” of their internal worlds to the “there” of someone else’s. In “Verdi,” for example, a recently divorced woman on vacation in the Sierra Nevadas meets and begins an affair with a cowboy. In the end, however, her new lover cannot fathom the hole divorce has punched in her life.

Physical travel becomes a metaphor for the psychic negotiation relationships entail. In “Fortitude,” an American serviceman’s wife flies halfway around the world to visit her husband in the South Pacific only to discover he is as foreign to her now as his new environment: his haircut, his randy friends, the way he puts his arm around her all baffle her. She gamely tries to go along with these changes. The tale’s violent climax ensures, however, that this distance between them is permanent.

With an almost too-predictable regularity, going abroad proves harmful for couples in Limbo, a shift Tuck affects with skillful alterations in mood and tone. The drift starts when the narrator, almost always a woman, begins to soak in the “different” sensations of a new culture. In “La Mayonette,” for example, an American housewife sunbathing in the South of France listens to her husband and another man playing tennis: “From the swimming pool, one can hear the ball bouncing and the two men keeping score. Since they keep score in French,” she says, “to me it sounds as if they were playing another game, not tennis.”

As these sensations pile up, Tuck’s characters retreat further inward and away from their friends, lovers, children, or husbands. Tuck’s prose, limpid and graceful, yet unassuming at the same time, is the perfect vehicle for plotting this internal progression. In “Hotter,” one of two stories in this collection published in “The New Yorker,” a woman and her husband touring Angkor find themselves feeling something like strangers. In a wonderful moment early in the story, she and her husband take separate pedicabs backs to their hotel, prompting the drivers to race.

“Now it seems as if the pedicab with my husband in it is catching up. The distance between us is only a few feet. I am able to read the time, upside down — nine-twenty — on the watch around my husband’s pedicab driver’s wrist. My husband is laughing as he waves in a familiar and triumphant way.”

Like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, short story writers of her generation, Tuck rarely unpacks these sophisticated moments. Rather, she drapes them over her stories like a tarpaulin. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to peak under to see what goes on beneath.

Because of her ability to style obliquely, Tuck has proven adept at writing noirish fiction. “Interviewing Matisse” involves the death of a woman that three women all collectively knew. “Siam” concerns the disappearance of an American entrepreneur in Bangkok, and its narrator’s obsession with finding him.

But the narrative and stylistic strategies that made these novels feel mysterious and fresh can sometimes fall flat in a short story. At times, Tuck’s fiction, like Carver’s, can be too subtle, too much about surfaces. In the odd tale, “Horses,” a woman visiting an old friend is shocked when it turns out her friend’s beau (and his comely 19-year-old daughter) are nudists. Although the story deftly charts the narrator’s discomfort, it seems to do little else than bare fannies.

Yet this is a minor quibble, for oftentimes Tuck’s fiction reveals further wrinkles and twists upon second or third reading. At first glance, “L’Espirit de L’Escalier” seems a rather harmless tale of a woman who fended off famous Italian novelist Alberto Moravia for an afternoon. Yet with closer examination, it is an elegant fugue to guilt; the woman’s lover abandoned her with this groping Italian gentleman only to drive to his own death.

The best stories in Limbo, then, are fiercely enigmatic. They twist turn and stop abruptly at dead ends and yet still have an emotional boomerang. In some ways, this is appropriate, for sometimes the best part of travel is not the journey itself, but the instant when one arrives home and shrugs into regular life like an old winter coat. Unfortunately, for Tuck’s itinerant characters, home does not exist.

John Freeman can be reached at freeman109@hotmail.com.