Amy Bloom Reviewed

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories

Random House, 163 pp., $22.95

When she was a little girl, Jessie Spencer, the subject of the title story of Amy Bloom's new collection, refused to wear feminine clothes, even once demanding to wear a navy blazer and gray pants to a wedding. On the way home from the wedding, her mother Jane "had managed not to see it, as you manage not to see that your neighbor's new baby has your husband's eyes and nose, until one day you run into them at the supermarket and you cannot help but see." Soon enough, Jane gives in and procures for her daughter an appointment with the best gender-reassignment surgeon in the world. Jessie wants to be a Jess, and Jane and Jessie have to rethink many things. Coffee, Jane decides, is a boy drink; tea is for girls.

Thinking about the gender suitability of common liquids seems like a cruel lark when there are deeper mysteries to figure out -- like how a person can feel like a man on the inside but look like a woman on the outside -- but Bloom is such a precise, observant writer that the topical and richer mysteries her characters are working on, each in their own way, are all of a piece. Which is a comfort to the reader pondering just how it is that Bloom's characters ever got together in the first place. In "Rowing to Eden," Charley, who is scared and ill-equipped, is busy putting on a happy face while his wife Mai undergoes chemotherapy for breast cancer. Mai's best friend Ellie is lesbian and has already had breast cancer; the way she teaches Charley that everything will be okay is at once startling and makes perfect sense. In "Night Vision" and "Light Into Dark," two stories involving characters who first appeared in Come to Me, Bloom's first collection, Lionel, a black man, slept with his stepmother, a white woman he calls "Ma," 21 years ago, when both of them were in a stupor over Lionel's father's death. The regret is sharp as a knife and seems as lethal, but all anyone wants to do is get through the Thanksgiving holiday unscathed.

It is easy to perceive writers who wield each sentence as if it were a story in itself as astringent, or even sterile. But Bloom writes with warmth as she makes note of the gap between what her characters say and what they're thinking. After Jessie/Jess' operation, for example, a nurse comes by to say, "Everything looks good. You know what they say about the difference between God and Dr. Laurence? Sometimes God makes a mistake." Then Bloom writes, "Jane says, 'Thank you so much. That's nice to hear.' And thinks, Another group of people to be pleasant to." So at least she's honest about it, but "The Story," whose unreliable narrator, a bookkeeper and widow in Connecticut, is learning how to write fiction, is another matter altogether. "Plain Jane," as she once refers to herself, is venal and wryly comic at the same time, and plots to get rid of the perfect young couple next door ("I intended not only harm but death," she reveals). She doesn't work as hard as Bloom's other characters do at mending awkward alliances, but it's almost as if she's aware of their situations, too: "I have made the best and happiest ending that I can in this world ... made it to keep the innocent safe and the guilty punished, and I have made it as the world should be and not as I have found it."