House Fires

by Nancy Reisman

University of Iowa Press, 212 pp., $18.95 (paper)

Winner of the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Nancy Reisman’s collection of stories, House Fires, is populated by perceptive yet lonely characters trying to find their places in the world. Reisman has divided the book into four sections, grouping the stories either by recurring characters or geographic locale. This method works especially well in the Buffalo Series and the Jessie Stories, where the reader follows the same characters from one story to the next. The Buffalo Series focuses on a Jewish family in Buffalo in the years during and after World War II. “Edie in Winter” tells the story of Edie and her brother Manny, whom she refuses to believe is gay, even though he leaves town for New York City to be with his lover, Arthur. In “Confessions,” the best of the collection, Arthur goes off to war and returns with a Holocaust survivor as his bride, thus devastating Manny. Reisman’s stories sometimes suffer from too much earnestness, and a few of the endings strain too hard for poetic closure, but ultimately her ability to create full-blooded characters and her wonderful use of language coalesce to make House Fires a winning collection.

This article appears in April 28 • 2000.

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