Emma Straub is a fine author, and Other People We Married is
rich with her subtle but persuasive talent. There's humor in every turn. Every detail is almost alarmingly perceptible through her
keen observation of everyday life.
She's articulate without sounding like a textbook, or a medical
dictionary.
The language is hardly spare, drifting between everyday ease
and profound articulacy. Her
characters are richly depicted and her scenes are so vivid, only a picture would
prove to be better. Somehow
reading her prose gives a more thorough, complete existence than immersing
yourself in actual experience.
It's not always funny though, as proven in her story,
Abraham's Enchanted Forest, briefly touching on subtle heartache and tragedy
without blowing it up into a tear-jerker replete with crumpled tissue paper
everywhere. Sometimes, it's so
subtle, it takes careful consideration to notice, and those are the plots that
I love the most because they're the most effective.
After all, not everything in life is melodramatic. Straub entertains as much as she writes
striking, moving prose - vivid and full of life. Her characters are realistic and they're hard not to
like. I can't name one story in
her collection I dislike in all truth.
Her magic, like I said, is subtle but persuasive.
Just like in her story Pearls, echoing a near flawless
rendition of what lies beyond greater awareness of circumstances that are less
than ideal. They serve to
enlighten us. This reeks every bit
like the rotten egg water of last story, Hot Springs Eternal.
Emma Straub is a writer that delights in real situations,
situations that any one of us can relate to. Her collection of stories is not fantastical fiction, nor is
it plainly rhetorical. She unmasks
the transcendental in mundane everyday situations, characters that seem so
real, we feel their immutable joys and sorrows long after we've read the
book. That is a book to immerse
oneself in. That is the sort of
book you won't want to miss.
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