It was late, 4 A.M., and I’d just finished the story for the third time. I turned back to the title page, “We Are Calling to Offer You a Fabulous Life,” and just sat there, not thinking of anything in particular. Instead, I sat there in the sleeping house, doing my best to chain-smoke myself into a coma, and rolled the feeling of the story back and forth. It was smooth and delicate, with just the right pacing, nothing too high or low. It was the delicacy that grabbed me. Laura van den Berg certainly has hands for the delicate things — things like longing and loss and being compassless in a strange land — things that any writer with clumsier hands destroys in the telling.
I bought this book for its title. And, yes, I know how silly that is, but the phrase, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, rolls so smoothly off the tongue, leaving a dark-chocolate-bittersweetness of loss and longing for unnameable things, who could resist? Of course, the contents couldn’t possibly live up to the taste of that title. Like the beautiful girl in the coffeeshop who couldn’t possibly be reading Still Life. You make up all sorts of fantasies, but reality is doomed to fall short.
But sometimes not. Some things are just as good as you hope they could be. Sometimes, a book is as good as its cover and — thank Dzanc — Laura van den Berg delivers on the subtle splendor of her title. The stories in this debut collection are spare, elegant and beautiful, offering that promised bittersweetness again and again, with subtlety and skill.
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2010.