I recently had a small French sort of appetizer that was like eating a flaky savory jewel, and I wanted to both slowly prolong and understand the flavor episode of what I was eating, and immediately have another and then another. Reading the entwined stories of Helen Schulman's Fools for Love was a similar experience.
There is a forbidden love between a string of poems, an observant young rabbi and a single mother; an admissions officer who finds a doppelganger applicant resembling a long dead boy who spurned her; a terrifyingly self-aware highly critical baby, a sozzled doctor who forces himself to take the longest of long detours home, and a spate of serial divorces, hookups, breakups, deaths, and infidelities. The boundaries are wavy and a mixture of unrelenting undeterred lust mixed with deadpan humor. Schulman has a perfect sense of when to end each piece, which also don’t always end. Main and then background characters flit in and out of these narratives like fireflies, sometimes like moths. And the bigger questions on the nature of desire are there too, and will hang around for quite a while. This is the book you want to have sitting across from you at a favorite café after you’ve both loosened up and had a few drinks and your literary companion starts to open pages and spill spicy, mesmerizing stories. They are bittersweet, funny, a little eerie and flawless. Why would you ever want to leave?