House Fires

Nancy Reisman’s first published work, the collection of short stories, House Fires (1999), won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award; some of the stories were subsequently featured in several magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. The collection is divided into four parts: the first is the standalone title story, while the second, third, and fourth comprise interconnected narratives that also have characters in common with each other. Reisman considers issues of desire, family duties and ties, and the intertwining nature of love and grief.

The collection’s title story, “House Fires,” is about Amy, a young woman whose much older sister has died in a fire. As Amy works her way through her own grief, and the silent, tormented mourning that permanently subdues her parents, she notes that the tragedy has been “dismantling” her family, as “one by one we shorted out.” For Amy, there is a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel—she finds her escape through creativity, and in particular, film.

The next section of the book, called “Buffalo Series,” is made up of four stories set in Buffalo and Manhattan during and after World War II, which revolve around a Jewish family whose siblings’ emotional closeness can’t help them attain the objects of their often hidden desires. In “Edie in Winter,” awkward and solitary Edie has a hard time believing that her brother, Manny, is gay, even when Manny leaves Buffalo in order to join his boyfriend, Arthur, in New York City. “Heart of Hearts” sees Edie launching into an affair with family friend Ben. Her sister, Marilyn, a happily married housewife who, nevertheless, has also been fantasizing about Ben, confronts her complicated feelings about Edie. The story “Confessions” returns to Arthur, following him as he goes off to war. Arthur promises Manny that while he is in Europe, he won’t fall in love with anyone else. However, what he experiences completely unmoors Arthur, and he ends up marrying a concentration camp refugee woman who has some sense of what Arthur is feeling. When the pair returns to Buffalo after the war, Arthur has to explain this marriage to Manny, whom he still very much loves.



The second set of linked stories, “Northeast Corridor,” is about a group of friends in southern New England whose failed romances make up the bulk of the stories’ plots. In “Sharks,” shiftless twenty-six-year-old Matt, whose pretensions to literary genius mask his general laziness, has been growing increasingly distant from his girlfriend and father. Making up for lost time, he comes to a holiday dinner at his father’s house, where his stepmother hits on him in the kitchen while his typically gruff father is in the living room. In what is a surprise to himself, Matt kisses her back. The main character of “Dreaming of the Snail Life” is at loose ends in Providence, Rhode Island. She is bitter and jealous of those around her, lonely and depressed about her lacking love life. Her main fantasy is to escape to “someplace else.”

The collection’s final interlinked series, “Jessie Stories,” takes place in the 1980s and centers on a young woman coming of age. In “Girl on a Couch,” Jessie leaves home for her freshman year at Harvard. A habitual pot smoker and fan of Allen Ginsberg, she assumes herself to be a hippie liberal with an open mind. Nevertheless, immediately on meeting her somewhat uptight black lesbian roommate, Dawna, who objects to Jessie smoking pot in their dorm room, Jessie pulls back from a potential friendship. However, when Dawna intervenes when a drunk upperclassman is harassing Jessie, Jessie finally realizes that she has been wearing “white girl blinders” when judging Dawna—and complete denial about her own sexuality. “Strays” follows Jessie as she moves to San Francisco, figures out that she is a lesbian, and finds romantic happiness with another nice Jewish girl. “The Good Life” turns to Jessie’s mother, who is dealing with her own mother’s encroaching dementia and with her daughter’s homosexuality. Over the course of the story, she manages to cope with the upsetting and surprising changes in her life through her love of her family.

Many of the stories are open-ended and do not wrap up all the narrative threads that they have laid out. This frustrates some readers and critics but seems to be a purposeful choice on the author’s behalf. As Meghan O'Rourke puts it in her review of the collection for The New York Times, “Reisman writes with a notable honesty…Reisman is interested, after all, in the way that loneliness—in love, in motherhood, in success—punctuates intimate relationships but doesn't necessarily change them.”