A Collection of Short Stories Facing Up to Life and Fate

Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories by Ursula Hegi (University of Idaho Press: $17.95; 119 pages) In these 14 short stories, Ursula Hegi immerses her reader in plights familiar to many of us: a parent dying of cancer; a 13-year-old daughter who’s suddenly distant; a senile mother attended by a generous daughter; a man trying to please a dissatisfied wife; a depressed woman dangerously close to suicide; a young girl who discovers that adults lie. What distinguishes the writing is the intense, internal voice in all the fictions and the shrewd choices of form, which fit, unerringly, each of the characters.

As the author of the well-received novel “Intrusions,” Hegi has honed her skills meticulously. The story “Night Voices” is written much like prose-poetry, the narrative thread less important than the painful thoughts of a woman whose daughter has died in an accident: “. . . How’s everything? This used to be Paint the porch and the garage. Shelves for the basement. Buy boards. Carla’s bed; he sleeps in Emily’s, closer to the door. . . .”

Moment of Rebellion

However, in the more traditional story “Breaking the Rules,” the narrative, in the voice of a girl sent to a rigid Catholic school, moves deliberately and logically to a final moment of rebellion, the kind of moment that’s all too rare in these pieces. It interests Hegi to set a character in an emergency of heart and spirit, an inescapable, “unearned” fate, and then to explore the tension and emotion that rise from that. What reader can resist such distilled drama? But, with few exceptions, the stories desert their characters before any saving grace or breakthrough occurs.

That’s a legitimate decision on the author’s part, and her closeness to the people she writes about shows her respect for them. Her attitude suggests that fate is inexorable, difficult and not easily penetrated. There’s certainly truth in that. Still, what we look for in literature, especially in these times of an overload of fiction concerned with immobility of spirit, is the breakthrough, the sudden “yes” to life and love.

This “yes” makes “Breaking the Rules” a real standout in the book. The girl in the story has been sent to the Catholic school by her mother, a revered opera singer who’s had her daughter out of wedlock. At school, the girl does her best to collect demerits and be returned to the supposedly loving mother. Gradually, she realizes that the nuns need every student they have and won’t send her away, and that her mother’s love is a lie. In a final confrontation with the mother superior, she screams out the truth of her birth, admits to herself who she is and what she’s trapped in: her fate. But her spirit is powerful enough for the reader to believe that the girl will break enough rules, challenge the lies and live fully. In nearly all of the other stories, things could go either way, to possible fulfillment or to further despair.

Only Reader Listens

The force that holds the reader to these stories is Hegi’s ability to make you feel that you are the only listener; these characters have no one else to talk to. Parents, lovers, children, husbands, wives are dead or far away--usually emotionally distant. A woman who’s lost her baby to crib death watches her husband and says: “I want to call out to him, but I don’t let myself.”

There’s nobody to call out to except the reader, who’s invited into the most private considerations of the character’s heart. To accomplish this intimacy within the framework of a short story, and some of these are extremely short, is rare, indeed, and makes “Unearned Pleasures” much worth reading.