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Gloria Kurian Broder
Their Magician and Other Stories
Other Press
ISBN Number: 1590511662
Reviewer: Doug Pond
In her debut collection of short fiction, Their Magician and Other Stories, Gloria Kurian Broder shows that she's a master of the opening sentence. Take the story "Hospitality" for example: "On a Wednesday evening Penelope Eakins, one of my roommates, told us she'd invited a murderer to dinner for Thursday." Most of her stories open just as abruptly. Unlike John Updike, whose stories gently unfold, Broder likes to fling her door wide open and transport the reader into her world from the start: "Alexei Sazevitch leapt out of the barber's chair and looked into the mirror after his haircut, and when he saw that he was exceptionally handsome for his age, he decided to retire." That curious first sentence, from "Elana, Unfaithful," sets the tone for a quirky, funny, and ultimately sad story that rivals those of John Cheever, whom Broder's publisher compares her to—and deservedly so.
Like Cheever, Broder has a knack for giving her characters authenticity with odd details. In "Elana, Unfaithful," Alexei blames his imperfect relationship with his four children on the fact that he had expected his kids to "look better." Could something so superficial really hinder Alexei from bonding with his children? One would think not, but in Broder's stories, as in Cheever's, a deep comprehension follows a seemingly impulsive or obtuse observation. Alexei is not superficial; he is a romantic. The word "look" carries special meaning to a man who decides to retire based on a glance in the mirror after a haircut.
This is to say that Broder is not merely a Cheever imitator; her style is her own. Her stories are not quirky for the sake of being quirky. The tone she sets with the opening sentence—Broder is also a master of tone, incidentally—often demands quirkiness. After Alexei decides to retire, he delightedly tells a friend the news and adds that his wife, Elena, is getting younger and prettier "though in fact he thought she was getting older and homelier." One can image the canned laughter, and the scene feels even more like a TV sitcom after Alexei visits a co-worker, punches Rothkovitch in the stomach, and plants a cigar in Rothkovitch's pocket to celebrate.
The reader is unprepared for the dark humor that comes next. Two days later, Elana dies and the compulsively unfaithful Alexei copes with his grief by choosing to believe, despite his children's fury and dismay, that Elana has run off with a lover. The thought actually comforts him.
Most of Broder's stories offer up good, old-fashioned irony—not the superfluous and hip kind found today in mainstream magazines, such as Esquire and the New Yorker (while one of Broder's strongest stories, "Elana, Unfaithful," originally appeared in Harper's in 1971 and was then anthologized in Great American Love Stories, most of her fiction has appeared in obscure publications.). The sort of irony Broder delivers recalls Jane Austen and even Shakespeare, with whom irony is central to a story. With Broder, you always get a fascinating situation: an orthodontist is shocked to see graffiti about him on a kiosk, which reads "Hepplemeyer is an ass"; two roofers hurry to save a man who is trying to asphyxiate himself in his car; a mother's advice to her four children to not strive for perfection results in them staying at home and driving her crazy; a doctor who loves Detroit resists moving away from the city during its race riots; and in the title story, two women worry over their father's career, wishing he would improve upon his job as an amateur magician.
Each situation provides an interesting contrast to its characters' reactions and emotional conditions. Hepplemeyer, the orthodontist, tries desperately to erase the graffiti, since it brings back horrible memories of being tormented as a child. He dreads the thought of his teenage son coming home from school, seeing the insult, and thinking worse of his father. Ironically, however, we find out the insult was meant not for the father, but for the son, who's not troubled by the words at all. Consequently, the insult serves to heal the father's childhood wounds rather than worsen them.
Many characters come to surprising realizations about their lives—lost opportunities, wrong turns, and enormous errors of judgment. As such, many of the stories read like small novels; they often cover a lot of time and a spectrum of emotions in just a few pages.
Compare this to "mainstream" short fiction—appearing in magazines such as Esquire and subsequently in book form. Bemoaning the decline of our culture is perhaps a crotchety position to take, but it seems that short fiction is no longer immune to the dumbing-down that plagues prime time TV. You’ll find Stephen King in the New Yorker. You’ll find slick stories by new writers with prose like commercial jingles—recently, Esquire presented the "dazzling debut of a new writer" whose story mentions, in the first two paragraphs, a designer drug, movie stars, and trendy footwear. Gloria Kurian Broder is a dazzling writer too, and she's probably new to you, but you'll have to dig up an obscure journal like 96, Inc. to read any of her forthcoming stories. Fortunately, however, the collection Their Magician and Other Stories offers some of the best contemporary short fiction available today.
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