Edith Pearlman’s tales of everyday magic get belated but well-deserved recognition

The 77-year-old Massachusetts-based author hasn't written a collection of stories but a community of them, with many in her latest book, Honeydew, feeling almost like pocket novels.

Edith Pearlman, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012, at her home in Massachusetts. Photo by Suzanne Kreiter / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

In 2011, at the age of 74, Edith Pearlman, of Brookline, Massachusetts, after publishing hundreds of short stories in small to really, really small literary magazines, became an overnight ­sensation.

It's so much like one of her vital and sneakily magical short stories that we might as well consider it one: after four decades of suburban near-invisibility, Pearlman and her collection of stories, Binocular Vision, was nominated for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Story Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the last of which it won. Several critics called her a genius of the form. This kind of sudden turn of fortune does ­occasionally happen to writers, but usually you have to die first.

There is a whole lot of life in Honeydew, Pearlman's masterful and necessary new collection of short stories. Many of the stories in Honeydew feel almost like pocket novels. More than that: they feel like pocket Russian novels. There are so many people in this book that you're left with the impression that Pearlman hasn't written a collection of stories so much as she's written a community of them.

Most of the 20 stories of Honeydew take place in a fictional suburb of Boston called Godolphin, and most of the characters come from, or their lives touch upon, a specific professional class. In fact, one could subtitle her latest collection More Stories about Precocious Kids and Mildly Eccentric Doctors and not be too far off the mark. Which isn't to say that Pearlman doesn't conjure a remarkably rich and diverse world: after all, there are all kinds of doctors, and then there's Emily in the collection's powerful title story, an anorexic girl "born into the wrong order", who believes herself to be more insect than human; or Lyle in "Wait and See", who has pentachromatic eyes, cursed with a more richly coloured and truthful vision of the world (he can see fatal illnesses blooming across the skin of a lover before she knows she's ill); or the father in "Dream Children" who paints grotesque, mutilated portraits of his children to protect them from catastrophe.

On her website, Pearlman lists “matchmaking” as one of her hobbies. It’s a predilection apparent in her fiction as well, where she creates characters with sudden, exquisite intensity, carving out this or that oddity, warmly observing them for a while, following one, then following another, until they seem so alive that you can almost imagine Pearlman thinking: well, now, wouldn’t these two make an interesting pair! So in “Castle 4”, Victoria Tarnapol, a middle-class 60-year-old hospital gift-shop manager and secret art dealer, eventually moves in with Hector Bahnade, a 45-year-old Filipino immigrant, security guard, father and widower. Or, in “Cul-de-sac”, what would happen if the young, alcoholic Irish cop followed the irrepressible, middle-aged Israeli woman home and essentially became a part of her boisterous, out-of-place family?

Then there is one of the more striking stories, the fairy-tale-like “Hat Trick”, in which a cynical mother convinces her daughter and her friends to choose their future husbands from names written down on pieces of paper and put into a hat. ‘“My darling fools. You dream about musical fellows, brainy guys, masterful ones, sophisticates … Let me tell you something: all cats are gray at night.”’

But especially refreshing are Pearlman’s elderly female characters. These are types we see far too little of in literature: many are former Bohemians, or cultured and curious women of over 60 who are sometimes wise and rarely bitter; still attractive and passionate but also comfortable and decidedly not overly obsessed with youth in the way we’ve too often come to expect from “women of a certain age” in fiction. Even in their disappointments and sadness, these women have a touch of the wonderful about them, like Ingrid in the haunting “Stone”, who envisions her terrible death while also recognising the enduring power of her femininity. They’re still women is the thing: not old women. And, like Edith Pearlman, thankfully, here they’re no longer invisible.

You’re left with a light feeling of twilight, like dust dancing through the air of an antique shop, one of which, the aptly named Forget Me Not, is the setting for several of these stories. Pearlman might disagree, but perhaps her fiction was discovered exactly when it needed to be. And not a moment too soon.

The book is available on Amazon.

Tod Wodicka lives in Berlin and Moscow. His second novel, The Household Spirit, will be published by Random House in June.