[REVIEW] Doll Palace by Sara Lippman

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Every story in Sara Lippmann’s debut collection, Doll Palace, is a finely crafted, stark distillation of a different kind of loss, loneliness, or alienation. A motley of bleak quests for happiness in a world of irony, desolation, and shabbiness, the collection features the seedy-carney side of beach towns, broken relationships, families reckoning with their babies’ complicated and heartbreaking illnesses, a father-daughter knife throwing team, and more.

With such weighty and often off-beat topics, it’s no surprise that the tone of the collection swerves toward the melancholic at times. The story that left me with the most cheer was “Houseboy,” narrated by an immigrant working for a ridiculously wealthy man. The “rock-n-roll hootchie koo summer” he yearns to experience in the U.S. contrasts with the bitterness of what he’s left behind, leaving the character to conclude in his broken English, “The whole world is cry.” Still, the character’s humor and sweetness left me with humble hopes of better things for him.

Lippmann’s flair for irony and peculiar detail shows up in several of her stories. “Target Girl” pulls us into a sideshow world where a father slings knives at his daughter for spectacle in whatever gigs he can wrangle. The father would “tell stories of escape artists and fire breathers and bearded ladies. God’s children, he’d say, though my mother prefers the word freak,” summing up these characters’ host of idiosyncrasies.

More oddity crops up in “Everyone Has Your Best Interests at Heart,” where a fresh high school grad is spending the summer working on the Jersey Shore at “Oh, Fudge!” with her best friend, who will head off to college at the end of the summer. Our main character in this story winds up in an unlikely romance with a much older, sort of dumpy reptile handler from The Reptile Hut. We’re left to wonder which is worse for the narrator: her seeming lack of interest in her own life or what the reptile handler really has in mind for her.

The eponymous story, “The Doll Palace” highlights the excesses and phoniness of an American-Girl-style girls’ birthday party, complete with baby doll spa and seemingly endless lines for pastry. The absent ex-best friend / sister of the ex-husband of the main character, Frida, funded the party for the children but sends a nanny as her proxy chaperone. The emotional quagmire of Frida’s compound losses intensifies in step with the plastic decadence of the day.

Mixing nostalgia and malaise, “The Second Act” immerses the reader in a cancer survivor’s celebration party at Raskolnikov’s in Brighton Beach. The main character here, one of the guests, has just learned that a fleeting former flame has committed suicide. Scenes of dancing “hot Russian girls” frame the narrator’s memories of “the deli, the arcade, the lot on the hill – these are the places we used to go.” Just when you think this means the narrator is pining for those times and places, she says of them that they “may have been no place special, but then please show me what on earth is.” A typical Lippmann set-up: The present is utterly alienating, but then the past was no better.

The concluding story of the collection, “The Best of Us,” gives us yet another character disenchanted with her life. In it, the main character celebrates her 40^th birthday at a husband-planned yoga spa and retreat, meant as a last ditch effort to cleanse the narrator of the stain of an affair she’d had. The new age atmosphere appears to conflict with the birthday girl’s more pragmatic attitude, though the irony is not lost on us when spa guru, Soleil, tells her, “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

Lippmann’s characters, one and all, fail to see prospects of their own luck, despite their urgent, tragic aching for it. Tightly written, compelling, and encompassing an imaginatively broad cast of characters and situations, I can’t help but wish this stellar collection showed at least one character catching a bright glimmer of what they hoped for, but I have to credit Lippmann’s skill at drawing relatable characters full of so much longing.

***

Jody Hobbs Hesler’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Steel Toe Review, Stealing Time: A Literary Magazine for Parents, Valpariaso Fiction Review, Prime Number, Pearl, Charlottesville Family Magazine, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, regional prize anthologies and other journals. Visit jodyhobbshesler.com for more.