Open When Alone

This is a novel-in-stories about Dean Singer, a middle-aged English teacher whose life is detonated when his wife Jane leaves him a long letter in his shoe on the night of their twentieth wedding anniversary. The letter forces him to reconsider the first night they met, the sex that led to her pregnancy, the abortion clinic where they actually became close, their marriage, their children, his own dead parents, his teenage violence, and the strange ways guilt becomes both memory and identity.

The book is formally built from digression. Nearly every story spirals outward from one crisis into another: ducks, school, Ethan Frome, water polo, dead parents, pregnancy, children, anorexia, sledding, Shakespeare. The intended effect is associative and comic-tragic, but the result often feels undisciplined. The manuscript has talent and energy, but it is also exhausting: everything is a riff, every riff becomes a metaphor, every metaphor becomes an essay, and every essay becomes a confession.

The opening story, “Open When Alone,” is Jane’s letter to Dean. She writes it on the night of their anniversary party and hides it in his left shoe. She begins with an apparently comic meditation on duck genitalia, especially male ducks’ corkscrew penises and female ducks’ internal structures, but this quickly becomes a way of talking about coercion, sexual adaptation, and women’s hidden methods of surviving male force.