Curve Magazine Reviews The Prisoner Pear

by AR

The Prisoner Pear: Stories From the Lake by Elissa Minor Rust (Swallow/Ohio University Press): The short stories in this collection all share the common thread of being based loosely upon real-life Lake Oswego, Oregon police blotter reports. As Lake Oswego is an upper class, predominantly white locale, the police reports are criminally unimportant at best and completely ridiculous at worst. The stories range from serious to light, from the mundane to the fantastic, but the writing style throughout remains captivating.

The common topic of teenage eating disorders is depicted in a haunting, heartfelt manner in "Iris and Megan Imagine Alternatives," a story about two girls who decide to combine their weight so that they will comprise one healthy individual rather than two starving ones. Drawing on the two-halves-making-a-whole concept that is normally reserved for lovers, it's full of lines that are simple yet shocking, such as "Iris did not have to say: I am pulling most of our one hundred and ninety-nine pounds. Iris did not have to say: Do we even weigh one hundred and ninety-nine pounds?"

On the other side of the spectrum are humorous anecdotes about a woman whose kidneys disappear while she goes on living as normal ("Vital Organs") and a town whose full moon suddenly stops cycling, causing everything from plants to people to grow at an alarming rate ("Moon Over Water"). Most of the stories are open-ended, with little or no conclusions, and read more as vignettes about the intricacies of life and emotions than as cohesive narratives. Combining beautiful poeticism with a matter-of-fact tone, Rust's technique is smooth and suave, lending the reader to care deeply about the fate of characters within the first paragraph or two of each tale.

Curve Magazine
January 2006