Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis: A Review By Salvatore Pane

Deborah Willis’s debut short story collection Vanishing displays an impressive range of talents and voices. These fourteen long stories feel texturally distinct from one another, and the book never falls into that trap that some short story collections do where each piece reads a little like the one that preceded it. Willis tackles gambling addicts who get involved in dangerous relationships with their dealers, directionless twenty-somethings struggling to navigate the slippery politics of poverty and sex, sisters dealing with the dissolution of their hippie parents’ marriage, and a deteriorating old woman who refuses to acknowledge her daughter’s statutory rape. These stories are as varied as the characters. Alice Munro provides one of the book’s most positive blurbs, and she’s a more than an appropriate choice. Willis knows not only how to represent many types of lives but also how to understand them, to inhabit them, to make their struggles whole and ripe with meaning.

Willis often writes in short, half-a-page scenes that stand in for long stretches of time. The device is played to full effect, and like Munro, she is often able to cover entire lives, a rare feat for short stories. In the titular piece, Willis follows a daughter whose father, a well-known writer, goes missing after his possible lover becomes engaged to a beautiful woman. Willis hints early on that she’s going to dart around in time, but it’s not until the story’s final pages, in which the daughter runs into her father’s lover in a grocery store years later, that we sense the effects of losing her father so early in life. Willis writes,

She wants to ask him questions. “Have you heard anything about my father?” Or, “Do you still miss him?’ But it seems ridiculous to say those things under fluorescent lights, beside shelves of microwavable popcorn and freeze-dried soup–Neither of them suggests staying in touch, and they never see each other again. Tabitha gets a job in a bookstore”¦ she settles, for a while, into this role behind the counter. And cultivates—perfectly—the sad, knowledgeable smile that customers seem to like.

Another standout is “Escape” about a gambler who begins stalking his black jack dealer, a former magician. The protagonist is newly widowed, and he now spends his days in the casino growing more and more obsessed with his dealer and her ratty apartment in the poorer section of town. The story ends in an almost anti-climax, a dual sleight of hand employed by not only the magician but the author herself, at once hopeful and bitter-sweet.

Equally successful is the handful of stories dealing with twenty-somethings overcrowded into tiny apartments. Reminiscent of a few of the stories from Justin Taylor’s recent Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, “This Other Us” focuses on a trio of two women and one man who live together, two of whom are involved romantically—Karen and Lawrence—and a third who isn’t—Lise. When the girlfriend picks up and leaves  town, the other two fall into a bizarre sexual relationship in which Lise dresses up like Karen to please Lawrence. The denouement is handled expertly. Willis writes,

‘Do you think it’s easy? Do you think I like looking like this?’ I tore off a set of fake eyelashes, dropped it, and ground it into the carpet with my toe. “It’s like I’m ripping off a layer of my own skin, Lawrence. Every single day I’m ripping off a layer of my own skin.’

“Frank” deals with similar subject matter, focusing on a poor couple living together right after graduating high school. Mike and Simmy end up babysitting a young boy of whom Mike says, “If he were my kid, I’d have named him Captain Danger.” They dress up in adults’ clothing they get for free at the dry-cleaners where Simmy works and eventually take the young boy on the train, where of course, mild disaster strikes. The stories that work do so because they reveal a surprising interiority, moments of revelation that not only feel unexpected for readers, but seem as if they were genuine surprises for the writer, as if she developed deeper understandings of her characters over the course of the writing process.

Not every piece works. A few feel a bit by-the-numbers and more like apprentice stories than fully realized worlds of fiction tangible with feeling. “The Fiance”, about a woman in a long distance relationship with her future husband, takes a predictable turn into well-trodden territory with little to make the subject matter new again. “The Weather” is told from the perspective of a farmer who lusts for his teenage daughter’s best friend. The story climaxes exactly where you expect to it with a revelation that’s been seen again and again. And due to the nature of Willis’ ability to capture the moods of so many diverse people and locations and times, the book occasionally feels directionless, as if the stories aren’t tied together thematically in any inherent way. But these types of stories are rare, and for the most part, Willis delivers a bold debut collection that signals the arrival of an already very mature writer.

When her stories really work in tandem, they recall the razor-sharp clarity and surprise of Dan Chaon’s Among the Missing, another book that like Vanishing is obsessed with absence and the methods we use of filling the holes left in our lives. What’s impressive about Willis is that like Chaon, even in her first collection knows enough to not answer the majority of the mysteries she sets up. She lets them float out and out and out, gaining a collective power that lives and breathes within Vanishing’s most powerful stories.