Other stories introduce characters who reveal the intricacies with which we all contend, the exchanges that we make with each other and ourselves, our negotiations with life—a husband cooking a last Thanksgiving feast in a disintegrating marriage, a lonely man who hates “small talk” and refuses to date, the attractive widow who avoids sexual intimacy for fifteen years. In gentle and detailed prose, Iarovici illuminates, with insight, affection, and a light touch, her characters’ tangled inner lives.
These are people who are not always at their best, but they are always sympathetic and the author depicts them with compassion. Iarovici reveals hidden truths that society often considers intolerable. The reader feels the hard edge of these characters’ anger and failings, yet can forgive them.
For example, in the heartbreaking and enraging story “Muse,” we meet a young Romanian ballerina who has been selected to join the dance troupe of a famous choreographer. “[I]t’s an old story: the girl plucked from obscurity in the East, the man who saw in her a miracle…” and the plot is familiar too—he impregnates her when she is only eighteen. But this man wants the child and convinces the dancer to keep it when she does not want to—worse, he has moved her and the baby into his home and pays for a nanny so she can keep dancing. A married friend, Mara, knows that the ballerina does not want to stay, that she is being kept in this arrangement against her will. Mara invites the dancer to come away with her and her husband. “We can help you; you can bring the child,” she says. Iarovici, having shown the simple way out of the predicament, illustrates the unspoken truth of the human heart:
But she doesn’t want to bring the child. This is what the she cannot bring herself to say: even thinking it hardens her breasts again. She won’t think of the miniature hands swimming through the air, reaching for her, mouth opening like a fish’s. She doesn’t want to bring the child. Horror will drop like a blind in Mara’s eyes if she asks, Can I come with you, start again, just me?
How horrified her mother, grandmother, would be.
When I read these honest and harsh lines, it felt like a rush of fresh air had swept the room. Many people cannot be so forthright with others, much less themselves. To reveal such truths and simultaneously convey a character’s humanity is no small feat.
Iarovici is a practicing psychiatrist as well as a writer, and her depiction of family life is surely influenced by the professional’s objective gaze. But it’s her innate knowledge of human nature, and the personal wisdom gained by living with grief and its aftermath, that make these stories memorable.