Things That Pass for Love
by Allison Amend | I OV Books
Review by Amy Halloran

(This review originally appeared in Rain Taxi Review of Books,
Volume 14, Number 1)

Chock-a-block with characters and places that have little or nothing to do with each other’s disparate lives, Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love is a pleasant oasis in a publishing landscape that often gathers stories only when linked, sometimes by characters, sometimes by style. This is not always a high literary crime — the shocking wildness in Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, for example, derives in part from a common thread of oddity. However, when many collections involve a series of overlapping characters that could, with chronological structuring and a little more weaving, be a novel, all is not right in the reading world.

Luckily, Things That Pass for Love, Amend’s bold first book, restores confidence in the untamable animal of the short story collection. Amend is a self-possessed and skillful writer, able to speak in a variety of tongues. She delivers characters through great details, as in the following sentence from the opening story, “Dominion Over Every Erring Thing”: “His face is whiffled with acne scars and he gives off a faint, though not unpleasant, sesame odor.”

Whiffled? Such dynamic use of language carries Amend’s stories as characters navigate obstacles on their action-packed path to the last page.

Things happen in Amend’s stories — people fall from the landing gear of planes, for example. There is often so much action that the narrative tension extends beyond the last word, and the sense of “what if” continues churning even after the reader is handed a definitive ending, as in “Bluegrass Banjo” and “The Cult of Me.” And yet Amend’s descriptions of the things that don’t happen, the non-collisions we humans manage as we blunder through our lives, linger in the mind longer than the events.

“The People You Know Best,” for example, is a great fumble-fest for Marca, book group leader and author of cyberotica; when a man falls in love with her dog, Amend articulates the scene with both humor and humility. We can also recognize the frailty of our affairs in “And Then There Was Claire,” a story that deals with death and mis-aimed love arrows without sentimentality, yet not without heart.

Amend does miss the mark in a couple of places: the eccentricity of her characters can feel a little too stretched at times, and the working class territory of “Sometimes It’s Like That” feels uncomfortably forced. Yet even here Amend retains strong phrasing and delivery: “Betsy stared at the baby and Tanya stared back with a look of pure adoration on her face, all the rapture of a couple on their wedding day, when all the guests seem to disappear as the couple moves toward each other for the first conjugal kiss.”

The author’s gymnastic ability to observe a feeling from several points of view and move it from the scene into the main character’s own experience is wonderful, and the emotion possesses veracity and depth. Readers looking for such profundity will find much of it in Things that Pass for Love.