The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Thirst by Ken KalfusD. Quentin Miller
Ken Kalfus. Thirst. Milkweed Editions, 1998. 205 pp. $16.00.
Ken Kalfus dedicates his first collection of fiction to his wife, but he follows her name with thirteen street names, ranging from “Route 202” to “Rue de la Sorbonne” to “Kutuzovsky Prospekt.” This unusual overture to geography makes sense after the first few stories in the collection. Kalfus’s fiction is unwilling to sit still for very long. No two stories take place in even remotely the same location, but beyond that, they take on a range of perspectives, subjects, and styles so broad that they threaten to break out of their two hundred pages. The author and his characters are in perpetual motion, and as a result the collection reads quickly.
This restlessness is welcome; a first collection of fiction should be ambitious and discontent with any single niche. It would be impossible to label Kalfus, whose stories are about topics as familiar to short fiction as infidelity and a young woman confronting her sexuality for the first time while traveling abroad; but also as unusual as the choices that go into choosing a suit for a young man accused of dealing heroin, or the mind of a Florida retiree whose death takes the form of a return trip to a New York blanketed by an eternal snowstorm.
For all of its experimentation and inventiveness, the stories in Thirst occasionally bear too strong a mark of another author. “Rope Bridge,” for instance, takes its style, subject, and characterization directly from Updike, and “Invisible Malls” is similarly indebted to Calvino. These writers are, of course, excellent teachers, and these stories could be considered Kalfus’s homage to them. Yet it is most exciting to see the author doing his own thing. His fiction is confident and imaginative, and although it is impossible to tell where he will go from here, it is bound to be worth the trip. [D. Quentin Miller]