Tense and Tension

Detail from Cover

The fourteen stories in Stacy Bierlein’s A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends are about travel, estrangement, desire, rootlessness, and maybe, sometimes, love. They are about rendezvous and rented rooms and furnished apartments. These are stories obsessed with two things (other than obsession itself, with which they are certainly obsessed): sex and the present tense. For this reason, they chart affairs rather than romances.

“A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends” is a funny, dreamy, mildly tragic story in which two women, intending a vacation on Nantucket, find themselves instead trapped on an island populated by their ex-boyfriends, whom they find “lined up on the beach in chronological order. Holy fuck, we said, at the same time. What the hell, we said. Tammi laughed. I didn’t. I caught my breath and said, Can I vote them off, one at a time?” It is a story about, among other things, the hold old lovers have over the present, even as they are banished into the past.

“Luxor” is a curiously different piece, standing out as the only story in the collection that does not have a love affair as the central action or thematic meditation of the plot. Instead, an American tourist is caught in the crossfire of an inexplicable and unexplained shootout in the courtyard of Hatshepsut’s Temple in Egypt. While many of Bierlein’s female protagonists travel in search of a new lover and/or in flight from the grief of a death, this unnamed protagonist is in Egypt coming to grips with a failed pregnancy. Hunkered down in front of the temple, the narrator insists, “I thought of the child I wanted to have, and not the men with whom I tried.” Though the story sweeps back and forth in time, even projecting into the future, and leaps from the narrator’s memories to textbook meditations on the gestational cycle of various mammals to the history and representation of Egypt within a single paragraph, the action of the story is entirely limited to the hot, brilliant, seemingly endless present moment of the gun battle raging overhead. As the first bullets whiz through the air, the narrator sees a little girl, separated from her parents, standing alone and crying. She dives on top of the child, who cries out in French for her mother. Somewhere else in the chaos, the girl’s mother and father are similarly pinned down by the gunfire. Strangely, but also not strangely, the narrator luxuriates in this terrible turn of events that allows her to shelter a child with her body, even if only for a matter of minutes rather than nine months.

What “Luxor” has in common with the rest of the stories is its fierce insistence on examining what happens in the present rather than explaining how the present has risen out of the past or considering how the present will lead, ineluctably, to the future. These are stories about right now, about moments that contain all of life, that trap meaning like amber traps insects. There are consequences to characters’ actions, surely, but this collection is not interested in either cause and effect or in consequences—unless it is to lament that no matter how hard one strains to remain in the present, the future always threatens in the distance. This is especially true in a story like “Where It Starts,” in spite of the fact that the story runs backwards through time from a young woman’s reunion with a lover who has already hurt her once to their intoxicating sexual attraction that initiated their first attempt at an affair, and “Two Girls,” in which a pair of best friends, both married, both engaged in affairs, both having just learned that their lover’s wife is pregnant with a daughter, spend a weekend away together as they consider whether and how to end it with these men.

The story that seems to be the collection...