Truthtelling by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
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Lynne Sharon Schwartz has an intuitive ability to write with soul and substance. In Truthtelling (Delphinium), her new collection of twenty-five tight short stories, Schwartz moves effortlessly between realism and fantasy. Her characters are not so quirky as the things that happen to them, and her introspective writing lets the reader know exactly what they are feeling. Her writing is clear, with lovely turns of phrase worthy of the highlighter.
Schwartz sometimes skips naming and overly describing characters. She is interested in action and emotion; she is interested in What if. A woman steps into a stranger’s limo and must rise to the occasion. Another is dumped by what appears to be a wrong number, but what if it isn’t? A second chance at love is offered in a grocery store aisle.
Schwartz gives us mothers who forget their children, magic apples, an alter ego who is gaining the upper hand and strange revenges. In the title story, Truthtelling, an old couple fulfill their risky early-marriage promise of divulging their past affairs. Two of the stories deal with petty acts of thievery and the internal aftermath of the unplanned acts. A young woman purposely sets out on a career path of marrying an older man. A married couple takes turns being the strong one in the face of their daughter’s ill health.
Schwartz is the author of 27 books and it shows. She does not keep her focus exclusively on the young. Her empathy for mature situations and characters is truly unique. This is demonstrated beautifully in “Taste of Dust” where an ex-wife is meeting her ex-husband after some years at the house he now shares with his much-younger wife:
His clothes were still good, expensive and pressed, though they couldn’t hang with the same grace. They would have suited him better had they been wrinkled.
He bent down to kiss her cheek and hug her awkwardly. She sympathized: how do you hug an ex-wife? She’d anticipated this moment and wondered if the mere brush of bodies could revive years of intimacy. It could.
In “A Few Days Off,” Schwartz explores what it may feel like to suddenly not want to endure the busyness of everyday life:
She felt an immense burden — something like a sack of gravel — being lifted from her, pebble by pebble, day by day. And as it lifted she also shed the tacit universal assumption of the need for action, for playing one’s part in the busy world.
In “Fragment Discovered in a Charred Steel Box,” a quite short story, Schwartz delivers a scenario that could have been written to reflect the summer of 2020. It is relevant and unsettling.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a writer who delivers complicated issues and emotions with heart-searing clarity. These stories are a treasure.
