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One of my pet peeves is a short story lacking an ending, which is why I am one of the few who cannot read another Alice Munro story. Fortunately, this is not the case with Benjamin Percy's second story collection Refresh, Refresh, where endings abound—maybe not happy ones, but ones that fit the story being told.
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By far, the title story is my favorite, as it has been for many people. It won Paris Review's Plimpton Prize and the 2006 Pushcart Prize in fiction, and was included in novelist Ann Patchett's selection of The Best American Short Stories 2006. Recently, we've seen a rash of stories touching in some way on the war in Iraq, but this is the first time I've read one that has engaged me from start to finish. "Refresh, Refresh" follows two young, rough–and–tumble boys' efforts to make sense of their world after their fathers have been sent to Iraq. They do it in the only way that they know how—boxing to exhaustion in the backyard, playing a hunting prank on football players, and pummeling the recruitment officer before he can declare whose father it is who has died. With their computer mouses, they click refresh, refresh, to see if, possibly—just maybe—their fathers have replied to their emails, so the boys can know their dads are still alive.
All of Percy's protagonists are male, and all experience pain, loss, loneliness, and confusion. A young husband navigates the emotional aftermath of a miscarriage; an adult son sees his father keen at the loss of his dog; a father kills his daughter's abusive boyfriend; an elderly brother plots the death of his brother because he's desired his wife all these years; a selfish husband meets his comeuppance in the middle of a deadly storm; and a son grieves over his father's abrupt disappearance.
The stories are dark and sometimes violent, but I don't see any other way to have written them. When such characters come to you and whisper in your ear, you have to snap to attention. You have to portray them with brutal honesty, without skipping the uncomfortable or unsavory parts. These characters do have something wickedly dismal about them, but nothing that should be foreign to any of us, if we are percipient about our own interior lives.
And it's another's interior life—that of Kasper Krone, the out–of–work, once famous clown—that the Danish novelist Peter Høeg writes about in his new book, The Quiet Girl, translated by Nadia Christensen.
If you've read Høeg's best–known novel, the internationally bestselling Smilla's Sense of Snow, you may be struck as I was by the similarities between the two books. Indeed, a one–sentence summary of both might read: Social misfit, using the help of an estranged father, attempts to rescue a helpless child from danger. Except that in Smilla's Sense of Snow, there seems to be a reason, a driving force, behind Smilla's need to solve the Inuit boy's murder. Here, in The Quiet Girl, it's unclear why Kasper Krone wants to save his nine–year–old former dance pupil from the clutches of her evil kidnappers.
Let me start at the beginning. After a childhood accident, Kasper acquires the uncanny ability to hear music with each person he encounters. For example, when he meets the girl's kidnappers, they have the sense of "D–minor, at its worst. As in Toccata and Fugue in D–Minor." Ostensibly, what drives Kasper to rescue the girl are two things: the girl has asked him to, in a covert meeting (this has its own set of problems, which I'll come to in a moment); and she possesses a silence about her, a peace that he wants and has never found. He is curious about this silence: "There are two types of silence … . There is the … silence behind prayer. The silence when one is close to the Divine … . And then there is the other silence. Hopelessly far from God."
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