BookBrowse Reviews You Have a Friend in 10A by Maggie Shipstead

BookBrowse:

Novelist Maggie Shipstead's first short story collection ranges from Montana to France as it ruminates on ambition, love and luck.

Ever since her debut novel, Seating Arrangements, won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2012, Maggie Shipstead has been a writer to watch. More recently, she made it onto the Booker Prize and Women's Prize for Fiction shortlists with her third novel, Great Circle, which has contemporary and historical timelines, and is partially set in Montana. You Have a Friend in 10A also opens and closes in Montana. In the first story, "The Cowboy Tango," which was chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2010, Sammy, a female ranch hand, is in an uncomfortable love triangle with her employer and his nephew. "Backcountry," the final story, reprises that dynamic through Ingrid, who recalls her ill-fated relationship with Richie, a ski resort entrepreneur old enough to be her father.

May-December romances are a recurring element in the book, most memorably in the title story. Karr Alison is a washed-up actress who rose to fame in her teens and got caught up in drug addiction and a Scientology-like cult. In wedding Billy (his third marriage), she became part of a celebrity couple and acquired a stepson five years her senior. This is one of just two first-person stories in the collection and a strong character study. The other first-person narrative, "Acknowledgments," is a standout. Daniel Murphy, a Michigan writer about to publish his debut autobiographical novel, airs his bitterness about everyone he feels hasn't been supportive enough of his career; his arrogance and misogyny are expertly rendered.

Two other favorites of mine are "Angel Lust," about a Malibu filmmaker who's clearing out his late father's house and coming to terms with the fact that his teenage daughters are growing into sexual beings; and "Lambs," set at an artists' residency in Ireland. In the latter, all the guests have separate hang-ups that pale in light of their shared mortality. There's a surprising dystopian aspect to this one, while "Angel Lust" reflects on reality versus artifice and the effects of time on the body and the memory. Similar concerns fuel "In the Olympic Village," a tale of determination and disappointment that spans two athletes' brief affair.

The author stretches different muscles in several historical stories. "Souterrain," which orbits one Paris house, spools backward from Iris inheriting it to her grandfather Pierre's life after his family perished in Auschwitz. In "The Great Central Pacific Guano Company," the French colonists on a Pacific atoll fall prey to malnutrition and the controlling company director. This one is told in the rare first-person plural voice by the female survivors and subtly reminded me of Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. "La Moretta," which takes place during a couple's European road trip honeymoon in 1974, is reminiscent of Ian McEwan's early horror-tinged work.

Shipstead released three novels before this collection of her stories appeared (see Beyond the Book). However, she had been writing and publishing short stories all along: The 10 in this volume all first appeared in literary magazines or on websites between 2009 and 2017. In the acknowledgments, she reveals, "this book came out of years spent learning to be a writer, a process that will never be complete." In a way, then, reading this book is like following along with an apprenticeship. Perhaps that explains why there is not much in the way of thematic cohesion. She's experimenting with topics and structure here, so there is more variety than continuity. I found the book on the whole slightly acrid — accomplished, certainly, but with little warmth to endear me to the characters and plots. Nevertheless, for any Shipstead fan, a new release from her is hard to resist, and it's rewarding to see where she first tried out some of her tropes and to track how her style has developed.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2022, and has been updated for the May 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.