Raison d’etre

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Richard Burgin, five-time Pushcart Prize winner, introduced readers to a twisted world of offbeat loners, men and women in high rises, and garden apartments who can’t help but charm you with their confessional voices as they struggle with phobias and obsessions that, no matter how bizarre, still somehow seem familiar and poignant. In Man Without Memory (1989), Private Fame (1991), Fear of Blue Skies (1998), and other early collections, Burgin suggested the best chance for these odd characters to overcome their anti-social behavior lay in forming relationships. The nine new stories and novella in Burgin’s ninth collection, Hide Island (2013), present a bleaker vision. For assuaging psychological and now even physical pain, drugs, and alcohol usually do a better job here than relationships. Burgin’s latest cast of anguished characters—an amazingly wide range including doctors, drug dealers, professors, and prostitutes—find themselves in mostly bad relationships, ones that are sometimes sabotaged by crippling memories of lost, larger-than-life loved ones. When a friendly older woman seduces a grieving son in “Cold Ocean,” she cannot possibly match the standard set by his dead mother, and he literally makes her pay for disappointing him.

In story after story, the use and abuse of money expresses deeper power struggles. Money even serves as the raison d’être for many of these relationships. While some characters try to buy companionship, others so urgently need or want money that they compromise themselves to get it. It’s fair to say that Burgin conjures a world of men and women who amount to johns and prostitutes.

Service jobs, Burgin suggests, ultimately prostitute people by making them pretend to care, even as they mislead and betray the ones they appear to serve. A home health aide in the collection’s eponymous story feigns interest and concern when an ailing and anguished professor endlessly reminisces about his dead son and barrages her with summaries of the boy’s short stories. Finally, as she takes stock of her life, she can’t help but recognize herself in the boy’s tales of zombies and the mad doctors who control them. In “The Endless Visit,” a studio assistant to a suffering, story-telling artist is so horrified at the things she does for her paycheck that she finally lashes out. She blames her situation on domination and aggression everywhere, even in ordinary conversation:

You talked because you talked first. You got the power of talking because you seized it. It was the contemporary version of the western gun duel. Whoever drew first and shot killed the other with their speech—only it was a slow death through repeated verbal assault. And people didn’t just talk, they confessed.

What’s remarkable about these stories of employment is the empathy Burgin brings to both partners in the doomed relationships. No one is to blame, just the neediness of lonely employers helplessly seeking more than they should from workers who would not otherwise be friends.

Money emboldens Burgin’s loners to indulge their self-aggrandizing fantasies, but then their shame intercedes. The independently wealthy man in “Flame” tells himself he wants to help the young transvestite he obsesses over, but after he plies her with alcohol and humiliates her with hundred dollar bills, he faces the fact that his intentions were not altruistic. “Reunion” features a similar character at a later stage of life. No longer confident of his physical abilities to pursue women, this retiree learns how it feels to be pursued by the very woman he had tried seducing with drinks and hundred dollar bills years before. Called to account for his embarrassing past behavior, he admits, “‘I’ve paid women one way or another to listen to me my whole life.’” He has become wiser and more sensitive but now discovers it takes two for a relationship to work.

Burgin’s actual johns and prostitutes usually get along better than the other couples in the book. With...