Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call...love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories.
People don't meet because they both like Burmese food, says one character, or because someone's sister has a friend who's single and new in town, or because Billy's nose happened to crook just slightly to the left at an angle that made me want to weep...People don't fall in love with each other...they just fall into love.
Everyone does it: women of fierce independence, men of thin character, rambling Deadheads, gay teenage girls, despondent Peace Corps volunteers, anorexic Broadway theatre dancers, the eager, the grieving, the uncommunicative. Even the confused do it. And they don't just fall in love with each other - they fall in love with certain moments and familiar places, with things as ephemeral as gestures and as evanescent as sunlight.
Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can - and often do - fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees. And if there's something they can teach us, it's how to conceive of alternative worlds and the terror and the exhilaration of venturing outside the confines of the lives we know and making our way into a dark, glittering unknown.
Winner of Iowa Short Fiction Award.
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"I was close to giving this one a 5. The writing is strong, the tones and voices and perspectives were generally ambitious and appropriate to the plots and themes, and and many of not most of the plots read as original and unexpected and mature. For instance, the story about the children at Tanner School and the one about the girls in the house in college were so good; the collective narration in the latter was ambitious and impressive, and the children in the former felt real and genuine and fully realized and understood. But she displays some major tics here (it's possible that some of these have disappeared with time; this is her first collection of short stories, after all) and sometimes the language/details felt like things that should have been taken out or changed in the revision stage - like something someone surely called out in a workshop at some point as a "darling" that needed to be "killed," as they say (and I feel almost certain that this was the collection of stories she turned in as her MFA thesis turned into a book, which means that the stories were likely extensively workshopped; but if I'm right, it was a damn good MFA thesis, and it deserved to be a book).
For example, almost every character (and I agree that they often felt interchangeable - except when they didn't, and those few were great) "snorts" a laugh or in derision at some point in the story. Only one or two characters in a collection should be allowed to have the same tic. It takes you out of the story and too far into the writer's head when the same thing happens in 3/5 of the stories in a book. The female characters, especially, are typically - almost exclusively - girls who are sarcastic and temperamental but not so much so that they are unlikeable but just enough so that they're "tough" and "different," a character type that could have manifested itself in different ways and made the collection feel more varied and Nissen seem smarter. It almost felt like this manuscript was the golden child at Iowa that year (and it was; it won an award from Iowa) and no one questioned it the way no one questions more established authors when they make dodgy choices. Obviously, I'm making that up based on my own assumptions, but if it had just had a little more pushback, I think it could have been just glorious where now it's only (only!) clever and highly ambitious and powerful with a definitive point of view, yet a tiny bit muted and a little too singular in its perspective.
That being said, the stories are observant and smart and well written. They pull you in when you wouldn't think you'd be interested in that plot or that character. Nissen has a clear and strong narrative voice and instinct for language. I will read more of her work happily, but there are just a few things about this collection that disappoint me because I feel like, with just one more editorial sweep, it could have been near perfect. E"
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Amy (4 out of 5 stars)