Edith Pearlman's stories have often been compared with John Updike's, and the comparison is apt. Born in 1936, Pearlman has published four collections; Binocular Vision (2011) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. For years, Pearlman has populated her fictional town, Godolphin, a "leafy wedge of Boston," with great characters. She revisits it often, as in "Honeydew," included in The Best American Short Stories 2012. Besides Coccidae droppings (also known as honeydew), it's about a headmistress at a private girl's school, Caldicott Academy, who must confront her pregnancy by the married father of one of her students. In "Blessed Harry," Mr. Flaxbaum, who teaches Latin and coaches the chess club at Caldicott, has been invited to give a lecture in England--or, unknown to Mr. Flaxbaum, maybe he hasn't. And Rennie, who runs the Forget Me Not antique shop in Godolphin, shows up in two stories.
Rereading each of these 20 intricate gems reveals their meticulous structure. Every story is brief, no longer than 20 pages or so. Pearlman says she likes "solitaries, oddities, charlatans, and children. My characters are secretive." Whether carefully dissecting her characters' feelings or observing tiny details, Pearlman reveals her acute eye time and time again: one character's sadness is "always wedged under her breast like a doorstop," and a man has "teeth like cubes of cheddar."
The collection has a distinct, Winesburg, Ohio feel to it. Like Sherwood Anderson's classic, Honeydew is a portrait of America, only this time it's the East Coast in the 21st century, as painted by one of our finest literary artists. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher