Radical Empathy

Robin Romm

Reviewed by Kirkus 

Reviewed by Publishers Weekly

In this new collection of short stories that Ben Fountain declares “all marvels,” Robin Romm (author of The Mercy Papers) revels in the mess behind the slick veneer of modern life. A financially-strapped college student sells her sought after “Ivy League eggs” to a movie star, then wrestles with her feelings as the child grows up in the public eye. A long-married wife in the midst of a bungled kitchen remodel imagines the excitement of her neighbor’s unstable erotic life. Isolated by quarantine, a young widow contends with a talking daffodil that panders to her in therapy-speak. Disquieting, original and strangely reassuring, these ten new stories make quick work of the easy truths and thoughtless salvos that keep us from seeing the wildness of our irreducible lives.

from Marital Problems

I can only tell you what’s going on in the marriages of other people; I’m not sure what’s going on in my own. It’s Saturday, and our “morning alone time” has come to a close. We spent it all out here, looking for the binocular case. Maybe my marriage is like a beautiful weather vane on a regal barn, its edges soft, its tin turning turquoise and black. It used to spin beautifully, but the center’s grown rusty. Maybe that’s a dumb metaphor. That metaphor requires me to extend it, to say that these alone hours are the WD-40 we need. Maybe we’re less weather vane and more tomato plant and this whole thing is fertilizer, or maybe we’re just aging and sometimes I notice that my eyes are more revealed, the skin around them thin like that of a tomatillo. A hardness comes through places that used to be supple, and when Victor reaches for me in bed, it only feels like habit, the way we reach for our toothbrushes, and because I’m not a toothbrush, I turn away. I want to circumvent this fate, though I don’t have the body for bustiers or the energy for finding politically acceptable, palatable, not completely obnoxious porn.