The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Officer Friendly and Other Stories, by Lewis Robinson
reviewed by Alan Tinkler

Lewis Robinson. Officer Friendly and Other Stories. HarperCollins, 2003. 228 pp. $23.95.

Lewis Robinson’s first collection is outstanding. These eleven stories reveal, by way of impeccable prose, the intricate world of rural Port Allison, Maine. In “The Diver” Peter, a restaurant owner from Portland, swims to shore after fouling his yacht’s propeller. In a bar Peter finds a diver who agrees to help him only after mocking Peter for both fouling the prop and having to swim ashore. Yet the story’s tension becomes fully realized only when Peter pauses to consider himself from the diver’s perspective: “wearing a bright blue and yellow swimming suit, getting his propeller wound up in lines. A yachting jackass.” In this story and throughout the collection Robinson achieves poignant depictions of the gravity and the grandeur of the human condition. In “Cuxabexis, Cuxabexis” Eleanor, a pregnant med-school student, travels with her boyfriend, Bill, to an island off Port Allison where he grew up. They stay with Bill’s aunt, Fran, who hopes that Bill and Eleanor will get married and return to the island. Though Eleanor initially wants to keep her pregnancy secret, she abruptly tells Fran the morning after they arrive. For Eleanor, as an expectant mother, the island simply feels right, particularly as she explores her impending motherhood: “The baby is hers. She already loves it so much she could eat it—this is something else which Bill wouldn’t understand. I don’t mean that literally, she’d have to say.” As a storyteller, one of Robinson’s great strengths rests in his ability to realize the edginess inherent within situations, an edginess quite like what Mary Gaitskill achieves throughout Bad Behavior. Officer Friendly does not idealize Port Allison; life is simply lived in all of its uncertain complexity. Lewis Robinson is to be congratulated for his impressive and fully realized first collection.