The challenges of love and fidelity provide the grist for Helen Schulman's smart and often witty collection, the aptly titled Fools for Love. In its 10 well-shaped stories, set mostly in reasonably well-to-do segments of New York City's populace, Schulman (Come with Me) creates an engaging cast of characters struggling to balance their desire for stable relationships with the allure of sexual adventure.
Though it wouldn't be entirely accurate to characterize this as a collection of linked stories, Schulman does display an affinity for recurring characters. In "Parents' Night," Mirra is a divorce attorney who encounters her ex-husband, Mike, at a school event. She then returns in "The Interview," and there's an allusion to her in "I Am Seventy-Five," as the eldest daughter of Lily Weilerstein, who discovers after the death of her husband that he had been meticulously documenting his serial infidelity in a collection of journals.
One of Fools for Love's strangest and most entertaining stories is "My Best Friend," where Jake Kaminsky weds Jeannie, the ex-wife of Phil, a failed novelist, in a ceremony where Phil serves as his best man. The divergent paths their careers take afterward set up a wild climax to the story. "The Memoirs of Lucien H." is narrated in the voice of an infant whose young mother, an ex-model, is engaged in a desperate search for a mate after Lucien's father abandoned them.
In these and other stories, Schulman's characters make enough foolish and self-indulgent choices to fill a volume twice the size of this slim one. But that's the stuff of enjoyable fiction, and she delivers it with style here. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer