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 (Lucky Dogs; 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. For example, Anna Herrera, who appears in the title story as the young spouse of a bisexual actor in the AIDS era, comes back many years later in the final entry, "In a Better Place." There, she experiences a hallucinatory encounter with her late father while touring Normandy with her second husband, Walker, a director and producer.
Another character who makes multiple appearances is Mirra, a divorce attorney who encounters her ex-husband, Mike, at a school event in "Parents' Night." She then returns in "The Interview" as the mother of a child whose refusal to talk imperils his chances of entering a nursery school she hopes someday will help pave the path to highly ranked college. There's also an allusion to her in "I Am Seventy-Five," as the eldest daughter of Lily Weilerstein, who discovers six months after the death of her husband that he had been a compulsively unfaithful partner, meticulously documenting his serial infidelity in a collection of journals.
Readers of Schulman's novel The Revisionist will recognize its protagonist, neurologist David Hershleder, in the Cheever-esque story of the same title here. In "P.S.," Columbia School of the Arts admissions coordinator Louise Harrington, the main character in the novel of that name, risks her job over a sexual encounter with one of the school's applicants who has the same name as her dead high school boyfriend.
One of Fools for Love's strangest and most entertaining stories is "My Best Friend," where Jake Kaminsky, fresh from roles in Oliver Stone films, 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. Another brief but enjoyable entry is "The Memoirs of Lucien H.," 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 before the child was born.
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
Shelf Talker: Helen Schulman's stories follow the challenges of modern love in the lives of a group of New Yorkers.