BOOK REVIEW: Short story collection proves masterful

“Honeydew,” Edith Pearlman’s recent and critically acclaimed short story collection, is masterful. Pearlman impeccably employs the short story form, producing a collection that is evocative, challenging and graceful.
Godolphin, Mass., a fictional suburb of Boston, provides the setting for many of the stories in “Honeydew.”
And although there are characters who make appearances in multiple stories, each story in the collection stands alone. In each story, Pearlman renders fully realized characters that negotiate life-altering events and crises great and small with intensely accessible and human emotions.

“Tenderfoot,” the volume’s opening story, introduces Paige, a war widow and pedicurist whose hope of intimacy with her new neighbor, Bobby, while at first promising, is extinguished suddenly when issues from Bobby’s past resurface. In “Castle 4,” Zeph, an isolated and self-possessed anesthesiologist who struggles to make personal connections, unexpectedly exposes himself by pursuing an improbable relationship with a terminal patient.

“Puck” introduces a recurring character, Rennie, the owner of an antiques store who impulsively buys an engaging oddity — a small bronze statue of the king of the fairies — from a frequent customer and finds herself so taken with the object and its history that she violates the cardinal rules of her business.

And in the title story, “Honeydew,” Alice, headmistress of a private school for girls, is engaged in an affair that has left her unintentionally pregnant, while she struggles to deal with a student who is both a star pupil and anorexic.

In the book, Pearlman expertly reveals her characters’ histories, realities, struggles and innermost emotions, and she does so by opening only a small window into their lives. But Pearlman manages to demonstrate more through that limited scope than most novels convey in hundreds of pages.

“Honeydew” well deserves the critical attention and excitement it has garnered. Sophisticated and skillful, the collection is a fantastic representation of all that is wonderful about short stories. Pearlman’s collection will equally resonate with fans of short stories and serve as a tremendous introduction to readers less familiar with the form.

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