For the desperate characters in Jonathan Papernick’s new story collection, violence seems like the only solution to discontent.
The novella that opens the book, “Displaced Person,” reads as staid historical fiction until the narrator, the Holocaust survivor Fannie, observes a sadistic Jewish gangster named Moses pummeling a mohel after a botched bris. “’Don’t forget to take your teeth,’ Moses Cahn called after him, tossing a pair of bloodied teeth like a set of dice.” Fannie is more drawn to this schlubby, animalistic gangster than Laszlo, the gorgeous, genius watchmaker and war hero who brought her to America and married her. It’s a confounding choice. Kapernick compels the reader to see Fanny in the way Laszlo himself does — not as a shrill ingrate, but rather as a woman so beat down by violence that only danger can give her purpose. Yet Laszlo might have more patience than most readers do.
Violence attracts other female characters in Papernick’s world. In “The Cinq à Sept Girl,” a young woman in an abusive work environment finds the thrill of violence in an unconventional relationship and ends up paying with her life for it. In “In Flagrante Delicto,” another woman, seeking sanctuary in sex from her husband’s slow death, ultimately rejects the freakish man she picks up, declining his offer to drill a hole in her head, as he has done in his own, and fuck it. (You read that correctly.) This story drops the façade of realism much sooner than “Displaced Person,” does. The violence that can come off as cartoony in the novella is transformed here into outright cartoon, with a wonderfully twisted black humor.
Many of Papernick’s stories are openly surreal, like the lovely and mysterious “When the Rains Came,” while others are satisfying revenge fables. The arrogant tourist on a safari, the bullies who beat a sensitive boy into unconsciousness — these monsters all get what’s coming to them. The mean boys at camp who torture the misfit get away with it, but a subsequent generation of campers does not.
The most moving story in the collection is “Emails from My Dead Mother,” which takes a surreal premise to an all-too-realistic end. The emails the narrator receives contain details that only his late mother could know; they even sound like her. Restored to life in her son’s memory, the mother is not a comforting figure. She’s a scammer of free hotel nights, a sybarite who leaves restaurants with a doggie bag “to extend the bounty for another day,” and expects the bill to be picked up by her dining companion, in this case her son. “There was no getting away from it — if I met her for lunch it was going to cost me,” the narrator realizes.
Even the characters who manage to escape violence end up in different sorts of hell, their lives deadened by relative safety and security. The end of “Displaced Person” gives us Fannie, largely free now of the gangster, sewing her “burial shroud” in the back of her husband’s shop. In “In Flagrante Delicto,” Jennifer escapes the hole-driller only to return to a “life of regret and remorse.” Even though it’s sometimes difficult to empathize with Papernick’s danger-driven characters, their psychology is fascinating nonetheless.
Jason K. Friedman is the author of the story collection Fire Year, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His article on the Solomon Cohen family, published in Moment magazine, won an American Jewish Press Association Award. He lives in San Francisco, with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
