The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Chapter from Her Upbringing by Ivy Goodman
Daniel Garrett

Ivy Goodman. A Chapter from Her Upbringing. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2001. 223 pp. Paper: $15.95.

In a world in which almost anything can happen, and in which almost anything can be imagined and any imagining publicized as rumor or fact, it is fascinating that human emotions still have the mystique and power to surprise and thrill. This thought came to me after reading several of Ivy Goodman’s stories from her collection A Chapter from Her Upbringing. Goodman’s stories are of atmospheres evoked with precise details and peopled by characters brimming with ambition, confusion, desire, pain, and rage, people aware of their own experience sometimes to the point of paralysis yet able to imagine not merely the social lives but the interior lives of others. It is possible that such stories will never grow old or irrelevant. In one of Susan Sontag’s early essays, she says, “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism-today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” In Goodman’s stories one gets the sense of experiencing people as they (we) are, gifted and flawed. Here are stories of artist colleagues who befriend and exploit each other, a dieting man infatuated with a skeletal (Death-like) woman he sees on the street, an immigrant Jewish woman who begins to feel at home in America when she sees an opportunity to prosper, a fat poor white woman in the midst of a breakup with a handsome but unloving black male, an insensitive doctor, friends whose unlikely friendship ends in betrayal, and a grandmother’s indifference proving to be a form of freedom for her grandson; not characters merely, but human beings, every one. [Daniel Garrett]