Alix Ohlin, We Want What We Want

We contain within ourselves pockets of injury. Our lives — once imagined as incandescent with promise — turn mundane. Lovers remembered become different people altogether, and those stories with which we comfort ourselves prove untrue. We avert our eyes from these places of hurt — to peer into them feels too scouring, too at odds with our daily struggle. Or we cover them over with lies we craft for ourselves, deceits tailored to shield us from our disabling realities.

Alix Ohlin, in We Want What We Want, is a spelunker who shines her torch into these hidden spots, revealing with an explorer’s pen those truths her characters might wish to remain concealed. Ohlin’s characters take up the weight of child-rearing, work, marriage, yet remain tied to the hope and possibility of their youths. Drifting apart of one-time friends and lovers weakens those ties yet renders them more piquant. Newcomers enter her protagonist’s lives, shattering fictions that make their days bearable. For others, loss and gain go hand-in-hand — security embraced paired with passion forgone. Relationships that appear unimportant come to a close, leaving those who people We Want What We Want alienated and unrooted. Amanda, in The Brooks Brothers Guru, believes herself averse to community only to learn how urgently she desires it — even as it’s unclear whether community can embrace her. In The Detectives, secrets uncovered leave Amber’s own life not necessarily worse, but more complicated. For the narrator of Service Intelligence, injury sparks rage that’s both unquenchable and paralyzing. Filled with human melancholy though they might be, Ohlin’s tales do offer their quotient of grace. Within their pages, new loves are discovered, weary loves are accommodated, a widower finds himself awash with love for love itself.

In We Want What We Want, Ohlin never succumbs to the temptation of style over story and her dialogue crackles with urgency and verisimilitude. She is a lover of the first-person, employing the intimacy it offers to participate with (in particular) her female characters as she brings them up against their defining truths. Any one of these thirteen tales would find a comfortable home in any quality anthology. Indeed, I expect to see some of them in that format. As you can probably tell, I’m pretty wowed.

We Want What We Want comes out on July 27. Buy it. And read it. But do so, if possible, at your local bookseller or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that uses part of its revenue to benefit local bookstores. Let’s work to keep those temples to love of literature thriving.