Review of The Prisoner Pear
by the Mid-American Review
Set in author Elissa Minor Rust’s real-life home community, the Lake Oswego suburb of Portland, this debut collection uses place as a dramatic backdrop for exploring her characters’ lives in moments of personal crisis. The seemingly quiet and perfect suburbs, like the lake at its center, are more alive and complex than their surface reveals. Each of these stories probes a depth with the promise of resolution, only to dredge up more questions. In the thick of these muddy storms is a hopeful clarity that goes beyond resolution or understanding.
Stories set in suburbia are not new; in fact, there are enough to qualify a genre. Rust’s new collection sets a higher standard and breaks new ground. While many suburbia authors have pursued far-out plots and desperate characters, these stories are about the everyday and the real. They weave in just a hint of magical realism to explore the aspirations and expectations of today¿s suburbanites.
While the design of the book and its themes are carefully planned and structured, the stories themselves are full of unusual surprises. Immediately beyond the suburban exterior and quietly published in the Lake Oswego police blotter are small, odd events—a headless parakeet found in a mailbox, a nude jogger, and a fish tank mysteriously drained. Who are the people behind these crazy incidents, and what are their motivations? The answers enlighten the realities of these residents, people who might be from suburbs anywhere.
Rust uses overt symbolism in these stories without offering simple explanations of their meaning. The “prisoner pear” of the title story is manifold. On the surface, the pear is the shape of the diamond ring Jordan purchases for Miranda; it’s the fruit in the bottle of expensive brandy; it’s the fruit Miranda’s mother cultivates in her yard on the lake; and, as Jordan repeats, it is he himself: “I am the pear.” The pear represents perfection, Jordan’s ideal. But perfection, like unrealistic expectations for relationships and for the future, is a fantasy with which Jordan slowly comes to terms.
In “The Weight of Bones,” a woman recently separated from her husband finds a skull in the charred remains of her detached garage of a home her grandfather built himself. The story goes beyond the standard plot of seeking the origins of the skull. Ellen is “more curious about the victim than she is about the criminal” and hides the skull away inside an empty drawer of her husband’s. Her ability to thrive on the mystery of the skull and the story behind it informs her ability to cope with the loss of her husband and jealousy of his relationship with a much younger woman. This acceptance of and belief in mystery offers a broader perspective on the aim of everything in the collection that comes before.
The strength of Rust’s prose lies in her uncanny rendering of reality. These deceptively simple stories employ strong themes without witty dialogue or narration or extraordinary character types. Rather, they offer a window into the realistic world of human desire and expectation—and offer hope for the future. The restrained writing and crafting of detail in Rust’s first collection of short stories is a major accomplishment for a new author. This collection opens the gates of suburbia to expose common themes among people everywhere, only here the similarities are sheathed within glittering coats of house paint.
Mid-American Review
Vol. XXVI, No. 2
2006
