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ZZ Packer has channeled the voice of the outsider. Nothing particularly revelatory happens in her new collection of eight short stories, at least nothing that significant on the face of things. A Brownie troop nearly incites a brawl. A freshman Yale loner with a "suicide single" connects with a pudgy white girl. An ex-patriot American starves in Japan. Packer's very real, fairly troubled protagonists share the feeling of being out of place in their current environs, with dreams of something perhaps bigger and definitely better. None are anything out of the ordinary. And yet, each of the stories in DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE, chronicling bits and pieces of the African-American experience, is extraordinary.
The standout in this group is the title story, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere." The title refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much. After Dina makes the dean's dubious watch list for naming a revolver as the inanimate object she'd most like to transform into during Yale freshman orientation, she becomes a sort of self-made outcast. When she meets Heather, a doughy fellow frosh who can't stop crying over a bad night with a new guy, Dina gradually learns to let her in and wonders if their relationship is something more than just platonic. Like all of Packer's stories, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" offers no hard and fast finale. Dina may or may not be gay. She may or may not be using her outcast status at Yale as a way of coping with her mother's death. She may or may not be the same protagonist, again a black loner named Dina, who alienates her roommates by eating the last slice of grapefruit in the later story, "Geese."
Another standout story in this collection is "Speaking in Tongues," in which a Sunday school-ish 14-year-old runs away to Atlanta and is taken in by a pedophiliac pimp. It would be very easy for the characters in this story to be portrayed as caricatures --- the naïve innocent, the man who takes advantage of her, the hardened street girl saving for a way out who ultimately rescues the young heroine. But Packer's nuanced portrayals paint each character a shade of gray. She is an author who presents the facts as she sees them and lets her audience draw their own conclusions, an all-too-lost art in a John Grisham world. Packer's characters are often, though not always, very smart. Many are struggling to rise above their circumstances, yet they feel trapped by things beyond their control: their parents, their faith and their jobs.
Several of Packer's stories examine religion with a somewhat jaded eye. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a lecherous preacher molests a fervent congregant. At the end, the man she hopes to save reveals himself to perhaps be her savoir. Again, Packer lets the readers decide. Most of these stories had already appeared in various magazines and short story collections before being gathered for DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE. It's truly a stunning debut. Here's hoping that Packer's next work, be it more stories or a novel, comes quickly.
--- Reviewed by Toni Fitzgerald
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