Stories Tell of Well-Heeled Women Seeking to Fill the Void

INTERESTING WOMEN

Stories

By Andrea Lee

Random House

288 pages; $22.95

The women who inhabit the 13 stories in Andrea Lee’s “Interesting Women” have interesting names like Merope, Silver and Clay. They are often American expatriates who exist in locales such as Milan, Paris, Madagascar, Rome. They tend to be well-heeled and well-bred, but they’re left feeling that something significant is missing from their lives.

In “The Birthday Present,” a bored 37-year-old woman named Ariel decides on a special surprise for her Italian husband Roberto’s 55th birthday: a call girl. She knows that her exacting husband--”an old-fashioned domestic tyrant”-- will be pleased with the gift rather than shocked by it. He hasn’t always been faithful to Ariel, his second wife.

Women seem to preoccupy Lee far more than men in these stories, so, fittingly, she makes the focus of “The Birthday Present” Ariel’s planning rather than Roberto’s experience. A good wife and mother who speaks in a “seamlessly cheerful voice she has perfected over the years,” Ariel experiences a rare excitement and titillation in preparing Roberto’s gift.

The prostitute becomes a kind of present to her as well, providing her with a break from “the fathomless triviality of domestic life.” After the birthday has ended, Ariel feels an inexplicable sense of loss, and the story ends on a surprisingly poignant note.

“Brothers and Sisters Around the World” offers another portrait of a marriage, and of a woman fiercely protective of her husband. Race is a recurring issue throughout the book, as it is here: An American black woman vacationing in Madagascar with Michel, her French husband of eight years, is unsettled by the locals who flirt with him.

Two teenagers, “not really whores” but just local girls “hoping to trade sex for a T-shirt, a hair clip,” are looking to stir up trouble, and do. The narrator is furious when she learns that Michel has taken the girls for a boat ride, but understands that he assumed she wouldn’t mind. She and her husband hold idealized images of one another: “mine of the French gentleman-adventurer, and his of a pliant black goddess whose feelings accord with his.”

Lee, who has written for the New Yorker and is the author of “Russian Journal” and the novel “Sarah Phillips,” flirts with issues of race and class much like her characters flirt with each other, yet she won’t commit to saying anything substantial about such issues. If Lee is capable of achieving the stunning depth that short-story masters such as Alice Munro consistently offer, she isn’t willing to reveal it here. Her characters seem disenchanted but are too complacent to do anything about it. (What’s frustrating is that they certainly have the financial and intellectual resources to do so.)

Their worlds are steeped in wealth and a jaded kind of glamour. Throughout the book are references to places and things unfamiliar to most people: “an overpriced hotel suite in Portofino,” a “beautiful ostrich-skin bag,” various playgrounds of the fabulously rich and elite institutions such as Harvard or the Sorbonne. Such references are casually tossed off without being examined. Perhaps if this collection didn’t display flashes of promise, it would seem less disappointing. There are some genuinely inspired moments, but too often Lee lets them languish. An exception is “Un Petit d’un Petit,” in which a woman recalls her encounters over the years with Gus, her best friend’s older sister, with whom she was infatuated as a girl growing up in Philadelphia. She says that “worshipping Gus is a private luxury like a certain kind of candy I hoard in my locker: a shell-shaped bitter chocolate with an Italian name.” As the two women age and move through marriages, homes and raising children, the narrator starts to wonder if “there is a hidden logic to this sparse set of encounters across oceans and years.” Though her crush on Gus is now a distant memory, she is left feeling an inexplicable, bittersweet sense of longing for their next meeting.

Unfortunately, there’s a tiresome sameness to the stories in “Interesting Women.” When Lee ventures into truly interesting territory (affection between women or interracial relationships), she raises more questions than she is willing to answer.

“Is it a story about black people and white people, or men and women?” the narrator asks in “The Pulpit.” Lee resists venturing further.

Longing, race, sex, class, home, identity are compelling issues, to be sure, yet Lee uses them in ways that are neither profound nor especially convincing. That men are minor players in this collection is less of a problem than the female players, who are sophisticated but shallow. They might be interesting women, but to whom?