A Jeweler's Eye for Flaw: Stories (review)

In the title story of Christie Hodgen's debut collection, A Jeweler's Eye for Flaw (winner of the 2002 Associated Writing Programs Award for short fiction), a suicidal high school student named James Woodfin writes a twenty-five page English paper on the "importance of outcasts." Hodgen herself, however, tackles this topic in substantially greater depth by way of her stories, deliberately highlighting those people many of us willfully choose not to see while also reminding us that we're all, to some degree, inevitably, heartbreakingly invisible to the world at large.

In addition to James Woodfin - an exiled teen so socially isolated that when he wears a ghost costume to school after Halloween, no one intervenes or speaks of it - Hodgen features multiple characters who seem mere ghosts of whom they might have otherwise been: a man with Down's Syndrome; a disillusioned, deserted wife who communicates with her daughter through a worn teddy bear; a high school star jock who suffers brain damage after falling from a building; a teenaged twin girl who's outshone by her ambitious double; a retarded man who works in a cafeteria at Harvard; a young, smart black man, adopted as a child by a formerly liberal couple, who rejects college in favor of performing on the street as a juggler and remarks, at one point, "I'm black . . . but I've never been black"; and a man who quits his respectable teaching job at a community college (thus causing the end of his marriage) in order to make more money as a janitor at the university. Inherently, of course, such figures evoke intense discomfort in readers - they each fall outside the boundaries of what we like to consider "normal" - and Hodgen uses this response to great effect, demonstrating a highly developed, impressive sensibility regarding character and narrative.

Regarding style, Hodgen's "A Jeweler's Eye for Flaw," the collection's first and strongest story, challenges readers' expectations from the outset: "The times are strange, and the ways we kill ourselves even stranger." The immediate, assumed inclusion of the reader, the generalized-but-intimate voice (which occurs in other stories as well), and the implied quest to define the story's terms all work to ignite the work's momentum. In this way, Hodgen's narrators and characters often demonstrate their intense need to place themselves within a human community, though the details that follow such broadly worded statements are highly specific and unique only to them.

And indeed, these characters have reason to be concerned about their slippery, temporary place in the world (which, in general, consists of poor, run-down towns in Massachusetts, the region from which Hodgen hails). In the book's first section, the title story features a teenager, Sandy, who has been deserted by her father and who watches a socially stunted but sweet classmate, James Woodfin, self-destruct, while her own mother follows a different path to oblivion; "Take Them In, Please," focuses on a young girl who leaves home to live with her medical student boyfriend in Kentucky, where she becomes the accidental but curious recipient of phone calls for an escort service; Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Boston Corbett, Booth's assassin, are momentarily resurrected through a handful of photographs described in "Three Parting Shots and a Forecast" (a story previously published in the Best New American Voices anthology series); a tentative, loosely connected family struggles to be functional in a depressed town at Christmas time in "Going Out Of Business Forever"; and in "What the Rabbi Said to the Priest," a young woman who married because of an unplanned pregnancy, but then miscarried, views the events of her life as a punch line.

In the book's second section, meanwhile, a group of four interrelated stories tells of the tangential interaction between Ephram, an intelligent, African-American street performer who grew up in white privilege, and Ted Roosevelt, the professor-turned-janitor who eventually finds Ephram's secret home in an old, unmarked restroom...