Susan Perabo is an impeccable author - not a word out of place, nor emotion overblown, not a single false step in 178 pages of prose. Toting this polished clutchbag of diamond stories, she has staged a poised entry into the gallery of US writing. She is only 29, yet her work has already been anthologised in Best American Short Stories. She teaches creative writing at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, and I can't help pointing out that she was the first woman to play NCAA baseball and is honoured in the Baseball Hall of Fame in New York. This is a seriously disciplined woman.
She states in the publisher's blurb that she "loves disasters, national tragedies, freak deaths", but really her stuff is more contained; the tragedies are minor, quirky, as in the young man who tries to think the best of everyone allowing himself a moment of schadenfreude; or the father who discovers his children are active sexual beings; or the ex-husband who fakes amnesia to get back with his wife. My personal favourite is the wimpish boy who finds out his inadequate father inhabits the same tough-guy fantasy world as he does. Yet every story is so quality controlled, so air-brushed of flaws, it is impossible to single one out as special.
Although there is much about love and loss, the title story is the one possible tear-jerker - a bereaved mother projecting her grief on to the family dog. This oblique look at the ultimate sorrow sums up Perabo's glancing style; all meanings are transferred; her characters, like the author, confront their emotions sideways on.
Interestingly, Explaining Death To The Dog is also one of only three stories in this collection of 11 to be written in a woman's voice - that seems to me unusual, given the author's gender. Even the story with two equal protagonists, one boy, one girl, is told by the boy. Perhaps Perabo thinks you can get away with a cooler tone if you speak as a male. Or maybe she is seeking something even more detached: an unsullied androgynous voice. It is certainly true that with many of her stories it takes quite a few pages to figure out the narrator's sex.
I wouldn't say Perabo ever gets funny, as in thigh slapping, but she is witty. She enjoys setting comic scenarios: a Hollywood actor's ageing father turns out to be a cat burglar, pinching jewellery from his famous neighbours; a past-it Batman's ageing butler just longs to retire; a woman panics as her respectable school-teacher mother, now retired, cold-bloodedly sets about blowing her entire pension on lottery tickets. Yet even when Perabo is at her most daring, nothing ever gets out of control. I have never seen her picture (it is not on the cover); she might be a mess; but I picture her without a hair out of place - even when she is playing baseball.
