THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD - Pasha Malla - Fiction

There are certain motifs in Malla's short stories--terminal diseases, childhood innocence, underemployed twenty-somethings--that make you wonder about his own experiences. That, and the fact that one of his narrators shares his name. Autobiographical or not, these stories are intricately constructed and minimally revealing, diving into uncomfortable and even melodramatic territory. Malla's subjects range from a more or less successful foray into historical fiction (telling the story of the Mechanical Turk chess-playing machine as it travels from owner to owner, and is eventually destroyed in a museum fire) to a story, THE SLOUGH, which starts out as something approaching science fiction (involving a cream that allows the user to shed his skin in one piece, like a snake) but then abruptly changes course, concerning itself with the main character's skin cancer, making the reader wonder whether the first half of the story was supposed to be a tale the narrator tells himself to make talking about his girlfriend's illness more bearable.

Malla isn't afraid to talk about anything, really. There are two separate stories that really seem to glory in the repetition of the word 'vagina,' two that describe in detail the way a woman cleans herself after sex. One story is about a pet therapy center in the basement of a hospital having problems when a bonobo chimp takes a liking to the pet sheep in residence. I don't mean to be prudish, but Malla goes the distance.

The most tightly wound story of the bunch, the most affecting and the most richly detailed, is THE PAST COMPOSED, which manages to work in a midwife, a lost child and a lost marriage, and a neighborhood orphan determined on deluding either himself or those around him that he has a family--a very revealing story, but the story that should go in fiction anthologies under "Show, Don't Tell," as it manages to work in every plot point as an off-hand revelation, allowing the reader to connect all the dots.

The second best is a very short, two-page story that closes the collection, a bit of historical-fiction-cum-fan-fiction titled WHEN JACQUES COUSTEAU GAVE PABLO PICASSO A PIECE OF BLACK CORAL. Based off a real event in Cousteau's autobiography, the piece manages to hint at a deeper relationship between the two and throw off some beautiful imagery, of the coral passed between two palms, the painter shrugging and putting it in his pocket, only to use it to seal a subsequent goodbye handshake between the two. The story is all about gesture, and unspoken feeling sublimated into physical proximity, and succeeds wonderfully. Not one uncomfortable moment to be found.