The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Come Up and See Me Sometime by Erika KrouseSuzanne Scanlon
Erika Krouse. Come Up and See Me Sometime. Scribner, 2001. 202 pp. $22.00.
The characters populating Erika Krouse’s first book are in many respects similar to the now-familiar thirtysomething denizens of popular culture: youngish but consciously aging; cynical but in love; hungry but unsure how, or if, they might be satisfied. In spite of living in a familiar world, these characters seem motivated by a far more introspective and personal sense of exploration than their prototypes. In a brilliant use of structural counterpoint, Krouse punctuates this collection of thirteen stories with the lines of Mae West. In context, West’s words become more than the witty and now-familiar one-liners of the original liberated woman. Ranging in tone from funny and playful to hard and cynical, these epigraphs provide the book with a sense of cohesiveness and become a unifying concept to a collection whose consistency might otherwise seem incidental. West’s humor, insisting upon the limitations and failures of love, effectively reveals the themes of sadness, loss, and loneliness that are the dark center of the book’s humor. Krouse’s protagonists are marked by a similar darkness, albeit one insisting upon progression and possibility. Other themes, more subtly explored, have to do with a sense of morality and responsibility, as well as a struggle toward self-actualization. Before the penultimate piece in the collection, “Via Texas,” one of the few short-short pieces, a lesser-know West line appears: “I’m going to give you a little inside information-I’m going to leave you the first chance I get.” In context, it becomes hard to think of West as simply the original liberated woman. The narrator of the story seems as motivated by her fears as by her desires. [Suzanne Scanlon]