Emergency
The short stories in Kathleen Alcott’s debut collection Emergency are like the sorts of people who seem to exude way too much cool and bravado but then you have a conversation with them and you’re like, “Ok, I guess you’re maybe a normal person with typical self-conscious neuroses too.” But then once in a while their sense of coolness peeks through the whole aw-shucks routine and you wonder if it’s all really a charade after all. (Below, check out my favorite Liana Finck comic which pretty much sums it up.)
There’s a whiff of navel-gazey privilege wafting through the stories — Emergency feels very much like a “coastal” collection, and one gets the sense that other parts of the US might be seen as gauche or simplistic to Alcott’s characters. Being cool/mysterious/interesting/sophisticated/artistic seems to trip up her characters as they sort through the puzzle that is their lives. You’ll either be sympathetic to that or find it a bit eye-roll-worthy. (Feel free to guess what camp I fell in.) Or maybe you’ll sift through the careful delineation of highbrow/lowbrow and chic/corny to find the most accurate representation of a character. The idea of “image” is a funny thing: Whether it be via photographs or sequin-y apparel or a false identity (i.e. age) one projects — all come about in Alcott’s stories — humans’ complete inability to actually *not care* about how one “looks” will always be one of our biggest stumbling blocks.
But these are great stories. (My favorite is the penultimate ‘Reputation Management.’) Read ‘em for a striver-y sense of what to aspire to even if it’s ultimately empty and/or unfulfilling…or a peek at what you may want to avoid…or a look at the insecure inner life of (mostly) women who project an image contrary to what they feel like…or, simply, for Alcott’s complex sentence structures and interesting turns of phrases that demand attention in order to keep rhythm.
originally published on instagram