Here an American retiree, come to meet the child his gay expat son has adopted, panics at the absence, in this Catholic culture, of enough other Jews to make a quorum for Yom Kippur prayers.
In a characteristic piece of misdirection, Judaism, one of the book's recurrent subjects, is unexpectedly at its most urgent in another Central American tale, "Day of Awe". Those stories, however, cover such a range of tones and locations that her variety may also have made her harder for the radar of literary taste to detect than authors with a more constant theme or geography.Īlthough several of the pieces are set in the fictional Massachusetts suburb of Godolphin – where a retired gastroenterologist faces her own mortality in the haunting "Self-Reliance" – the book also travels to Central America, where, in "Vaquita", a veteran health minister looks back on a period as a political exile, hiding in a barn with a cow. Three of the stories in Binocular Vision, which follow the same characters through the second world war, seem to be reaching towards a novel, but she is clearly happiest over the rapid span. It is notoriously tough to achieve literary fame without writing a novel: even Alice Munro, superstar of the brief piece, has dabbled in longer narrative. There are hints within the book of why Pearlman has been a latecomer to the sort of recognition that she clearly deserves. Even now, though, the book's British launch comes from a plucky smaller publisher, Pushkin Press. This volume of 34 stories from across her career has popularised the view that an American writer from the decade that produced John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Anne Tyler had been seriously under-valued and may even be their equal.
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