Neighbors and Other Stories
Review of the short story collection by Bette Bono
All the stories are short and delightful.
Most the narrators are chatty and neighborly — hence the title.
Sometimes she starts with an ambiguous and misleading historical setting and, at the end, delivers a perspective-changing revelation.
Sometimes a narrator returns, connecting one story to another in a surprising way. For instance, the last story sweetly and naturally connects with the first.
Sometimes a narrator reveals more about him/herself than the people talked about, and the narrator unwittingly and ironically becomes the subject of the story (like Maupassant).
Other times the narrator slowly reveals herself as a character in the story she is telling.
There’s dash of romance among plus-60s, as in At the Fair.
I particularly enjoyed Synesthesia and its sister story Rob Allen, in which being born seeing colors differently from most people becomes a valuable skill in wartime. “Think about how you could go your whole life and never realize you and someone else were staring at the same thing but seeing something totally different.”
Sometimes she adds a dash of the supernatural or the exotic to ordinary life. For instance, in The Lighthouse. “Once I viewed a ceremony, I guess you could call it. An octopus joined hands with his family and danced in a circle. I’ve seen three different sea dragons… And once… a mermaid.” Also, A Trip to the Moon ends with an intriguing hint of time travel and makes me want to read more Jules Verne.
In Of Mystery and the Meaning of Life, “Matthew likes stories about me growing up. For a New York City kid living in a fancy apartment building, Illinois is as exotic as never Never Land.” In that same story she hints that story telling is part of the meaning of life, “part of what you were supposed to do.” “I had figured out two things so far. people were supposed to learn things… And People were supposed to love other people… and “He had figured out a third thing that people were supposed to do… the most obvious thing in the world, ‘we’re supposed to tell stories. Stories that fit.’”
And Grand Central has several memorable lines that hint at the charm of the entire collection:
“… New York City, where solitude is as scarce as virtue.”
“New Yorkers didn’t like the word ‘terminal’. Or the concept. Nothing was supposed to end in New York. The mystique of New York was that it was always about beginnings. Funny that a place steeped in history should always look to the new and reinvented.”
“Maybe the next time she went to the station, she would again dispense with an escort Maybe she’d bring a suitcase. Maybe she’d believe the road to heaven was found by barding a train.”
