The act and accoutrements of writing flow through several lives in The Typing Lady, a contemplative and emotionally evocative collection of 11 short stories by novelist Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness).
The collection opens with its titular entry, a metafictional story in the form of an author's note in which three typing ladies appear: the narrator, a writer, and the writer's main character, a woman who collects typewriters. The narrator muses that storytelling is "how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being," and a ribbon of stories about characters whose lives are touched by the written word unspools to prove her point. A would-be poet tends to an aging doctor with dementia in exchange for housing in "Leafblower." A married couple lives uneasily with the ghostlike forms of their lost aspirations in "Where Ambition Goes to Die." A novelist creates a fake dating profile to observe the kinds of young men her teenage granddaughter might date and takes her ruse too far in "The Problem of the Body." The protagonist in "Immortal" feels a compulsion to eat plastic; of the typewriter keys they've eaten, they say the vowels tasted best.
Ozeki's settings include a 21st-century college town, a drizzly island off the coast of British Columbia, and Yale in the late 1960s. Her deft, observant prose is studded with pinpricks of nostalgia, regret, and humor. Typewriters, invisible ink, and logophilia appear as repeating motifs and underscore the written word's integral place in the human condition. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads