Schiff's stories all feature as protagonist a single, straight, Jewish, Gen-Y/millennial who lost her father as a young adult. And they are keen, compulsively readable, observant, and sharply witty. Still, they make me glad I am closer to death than I am to any of the dismal sexual encounters she describes. Men and women her age hook up, have sex, and don't remember any of it the next day, not because they blacked out, but because they were bored, it seems. And as for love, that is entirely missing in action. Kids these days...
Dwight Garner gave this collection a glowing review in the NYT, and I get it. Lines such as, "We drove back to his grow house with egg dripping off the side of the car, then fucked in an Aeron chair he'd bought when he had money..." (from It Doesn't Have to Be a Big Deal) are good, and not just because they're funny and snarky and rude. Schiff has a real economy with language, and she can load more meaning in a paragraph than some writers put in entire novels. Take as another example this line from Little Girl: "She slept with men who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan." Or 100 more like it. I might wish I had written those things, but I'm glad I haven't actually lived them.
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