NINE INCHES - Tom Perrotta - Short Stories

I received this book through Goodreads First Reads, and I'm still excited that I did! I loved "Little Children", "The Leftovers", and "Election", so getting a book that I was looking forward to three months ahead of schedule was a lovely present. 

Perrotta's short stories are about loss, disappointment, failure, and the people who bring these conditions upon themselves. Other reviewers have called them sad, but I'm not the best judge of that. I love to read a story and then think, ouch. 

These stories don't have twists so much as they have sinkholes. We're given a recognizable premise--a high school teacher, a football player with a concussion, a retiree with a loveless marriage--and a problem--a poor performance review, a season on the sidelines, an air compressor inconveniently in the neighbor's yard--and slowly, grievances pile up, bad decisions are made, and eventually someone does something so delightfully and painfully inappropriate that the original problem isn't solved, exactly, but becomes irrelevant in the face of the new difficulty.

The arrangement of stories in this collection also plays with the reader's expectations. The first story sets up some great problems--a stalker cop, a dead-end job, being the only one of your friends not accepted to college--but these all turn out to be straw men; the real problem is only that which the narrator brings upon himself, and it turns out that this isn't the first time he's done so. The subsequent stories continue in this vein, presenting the reader first with a very interesting problem--like the homophobic dad in "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face", whose issues with his son are left unresolved--and then swerving around it to a different, more complex problem. In this way, every wrinkle that comes up seems as if it could be the crux of the story, until one actually is. In "Kiddie Pool", we think the problem will be that the main character is caught trespassing. Then, we think he'll have a heart attack. Eventually, he's the one to discover something that casts decades of his past in doubt.

This formula of delayed expectation makes the final story in the collection, "The All-Night Party", much better than it would be alone. Will the problem stem from the teenagers sleeping together? The drunk, rejected girl? The self-important cop? The frazzled mother who hits her daughter's classmate? As it turns out...none of the above. There is no problem. As far as we know, everything turns out fine. It's quite startling.