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Joe's Reviews > You May See a Stranger: Stories
You May See a Stranger: Stories
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Paula Whyman and her debut novel You May See a Stranger: Stories. Published in 2016, this is a novel-in-stories akin to Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, the distinction being that each of Whyman's tales sustain the point-of-view of one character. Miranda Weber is introduced in driver's ed at age 15 and through episodes spread across a lifetime concludes with her entering perimenopause at age 50. The cumulative effect owes a lot to Strout in how natural and lived-in it all feels and how insatiably readable it is.
In Driver's Education, Miranda's class is held in a department store basement in evenings. She meets her ideal boy, a California surfer, and spends breaks making out with him in the camping equipment display, but her thoughts inexplicably turn toward a cigarette smoking "grit" (her new boyfriend's term for redneck) who disrupts their class. Things come to a head between the grit and their instructor, a black Vietnam vet with a prosthetic leg. In Drosophilia, an 18-year-old Miranda chaperones her mentally impaired sister Donna to a dance, indignant that their parents wish she'd spend more time with her.
In You May See a Stranger, Miranda attends a fancy dinner with her derelict boyfriend Pogo and searches for the right moment to tell him that she's pregnant. A year later in Dubrovnik 1989, she's drifting from job to job in D.C. with the companionship of her best friend, who tolerates Miranda's drug use and sexual misadventures, hoping she'll figure herself out and accompany him to Croatia. In Transfigured Night, Miranda is married to an aircraft engineer named Devin who wants children whereas Miranda, mindful of her sister's impairment, does not. In Jump, she imagines what was going through her sister's mind when she dove off her balcony.
Jumping is an impulse based on an opportunity. When they put barriers along the sides of the Duke Ellington Bridge, people stopped jumping. There's another bridge a few blocks away, but they don't go to that bridge, they just don't jump. Maybe they go home and slash their wrists. But I don't think the people who are jumping and the people who are cutting their wrists open are in the same demographic group. If you slash your wrists, you're going to have to deal with blood before you pass out, but if you jump, it's someone else's problem. Now, the way my sister did it, the outcome might have been different. She might have been paralyzed. She didn't think it through. This was her hallmark; she did not think things through. She needed me for that. But she never asked me. There's a news story about a local man who jumped off the roof of his house and landed on the driveway. He didn't fall very far, but he fell just the right way, and he died. The newspaper containing the story is folded up in a magazine rack next to the toilet in Donna's bathroom. Did she read it? Did she think about this man and what led him to carry the ladder from the garage and lean it up against the back of the house when no one was home? To sit on his roof killing a six-pack and tossing the empties into his wife's flower garden? But that is mundane. If I could imagine what led her to launch herself over the railing, I might do it too. I swing one leg up, hooking my foot over the railing. In my imagination, I'm graceful, more than I ever was in three months of ballet classes where another girl, one who was clumsy but fast and strong enough to tackle me, pinched my legs through the pink tights and left bruises.
In Bad Side In, a 35-year-old Miranda is a married mother of two and in the wake of 9/11 and the D.C. sniper attacks, invites a contractor in to discuss fencing her yard. Four years later in Threat Potential, she visits Mexico with Devin and their two children, an adventurous Type-A daughter and a son who infuriates his father by wanting to turn objects at hand into musical instruments. In Self Report, Miranda visits a high-priced family therapist to discuss the behavior of the child she would've never bet would need child therapy. In Just Sex, changes in her hormone balance coincide with a reunion with Pogo.
Behind its absolutely fantastic title and alluring book cover, You May See a Stranger: Stories reminded me of a Richard Linklater film put to prose, his Before trilogy put to print. Whyman favors drama a bit more--a brawl, a suicide, an accident on the road--but her stories are spaced out like moments I remember from my own life. Miranda doesn't win a Pultizer and the men she ends up with hardly seem like prizes. I wanted so much more for her, but isn't that the way it goes? No one gets what they deserve. The first story, which is also the first one Whyman wrote, is my favorite.
According to their ads, the Simple Safe Solution Driving School offered classes "at numerous satellite locations in order to serve a larger geographic area." Our classroom was at the end of a deserted corridor in the basement of the Mackleby-Warner department store. At first I thought the basement looked like the set of a slasher movie: the gray tub filled with naked mannequins and spare body parts was the place where the killer hid his victims. Empty plastic hangers stacked to the ceiling on tall, metal poles, and straight pins covering the floor were instruments of torture. If you stepped on the pins just right, they could go through the sole of your shoe. The main level of the store was like part of the house visitors were allowed to see, everything clean and perfect, with no indication of what might be amiss (ominous music swelling in the background). One. Floor. Below.
I belong to the same generation as Whyman--Generation X--and I recognized the stops Miranda made in life. The book features movie references as well as music cues (The Pixies, The Clash, Radiohead, "Some Enchanted Evening," from the soundtrack of South Pacific) which breaks the rule that authors shouldn't name films or songs that readers may be unfamiliar with. I loved the places that Whyman's mind drifted to, such as a National Symphony performance where she notices her husband's binoculars trained on a gorgeous cellist Miranda refers to as "Brenda Starr." Based on her observations, Miranda judges Brenda is boning the conductor.
Paula Whyman, like both parents, was born and raised in the Washington D.C. area. She worked as a production editor assembling the DC Apartment Shoppers Guide and as an editor at APA Books. In 2000, Whyman earned her MFA in literature, with a creative writing focus, from American University. Her stories have been published in McSweeney's Quarterly, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review and The Washington Post and on NPR's All Things Considered. In 2016, she founded the online literary journal Scoundrel Time and serves as editor-in-chief. She resides in Bethseda, Maryland.
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
In Driver's Education, Miranda's class is held in a department store basement in evenings. She meets her ideal boy, a California surfer, and spends breaks making out with him in the camping equipment display, but her thoughts inexplicably turn toward a cigarette smoking "grit" (her new boyfriend's term for redneck) who disrupts their class. Things come to a head between the grit and their instructor, a black Vietnam vet with a prosthetic leg. In Drosophilia, an 18-year-old Miranda chaperones her mentally impaired sister Donna to a dance, indignant that their parents wish she'd spend more time with her.
In You May See a Stranger, Miranda attends a fancy dinner with her derelict boyfriend Pogo and searches for the right moment to tell him that she's pregnant. A year later in Dubrovnik 1989, she's drifting from job to job in D.C. with the companionship of her best friend, who tolerates Miranda's drug use and sexual misadventures, hoping she'll figure herself out and accompany him to Croatia. In Transfigured Night, Miranda is married to an aircraft engineer named Devin who wants children whereas Miranda, mindful of her sister's impairment, does not. In Jump, she imagines what was going through her sister's mind when she dove off her balcony.
Jumping is an impulse based on an opportunity. When they put barriers along the sides of the Duke Ellington Bridge, people stopped jumping. There's another bridge a few blocks away, but they don't go to that bridge, they just don't jump. Maybe they go home and slash their wrists. But I don't think the people who are jumping and the people who are cutting their wrists open are in the same demographic group. If you slash your wrists, you're going to have to deal with blood before you pass out, but if you jump, it's someone else's problem. Now, the way my sister did it, the outcome might have been different. She might have been paralyzed. She didn't think it through. This was her hallmark; she did not think things through. She needed me for that. But she never asked me. There's a news story about a local man who jumped off the roof of his house and landed on the driveway. He didn't fall very far, but he fell just the right way, and he died. The newspaper containing the story is folded up in a magazine rack next to the toilet in Donna's bathroom. Did she read it? Did she think about this man and what led him to carry the ladder from the garage and lean it up against the back of the house when no one was home? To sit on his roof killing a six-pack and tossing the empties into his wife's flower garden? But that is mundane. If I could imagine what led her to launch herself over the railing, I might do it too. I swing one leg up, hooking my foot over the railing. In my imagination, I'm graceful, more than I ever was in three months of ballet classes where another girl, one who was clumsy but fast and strong enough to tackle me, pinched my legs through the pink tights and left bruises.
In Bad Side In, a 35-year-old Miranda is a married mother of two and in the wake of 9/11 and the D.C. sniper attacks, invites a contractor in to discuss fencing her yard. Four years later in Threat Potential, she visits Mexico with Devin and their two children, an adventurous Type-A daughter and a son who infuriates his father by wanting to turn objects at hand into musical instruments. In Self Report, Miranda visits a high-priced family therapist to discuss the behavior of the child she would've never bet would need child therapy. In Just Sex, changes in her hormone balance coincide with a reunion with Pogo.
Behind its absolutely fantastic title and alluring book cover, You May See a Stranger: Stories reminded me of a Richard Linklater film put to prose, his Before trilogy put to print. Whyman favors drama a bit more--a brawl, a suicide, an accident on the road--but her stories are spaced out like moments I remember from my own life. Miranda doesn't win a Pultizer and the men she ends up with hardly seem like prizes. I wanted so much more for her, but isn't that the way it goes? No one gets what they deserve. The first story, which is also the first one Whyman wrote, is my favorite.
According to their ads, the Simple Safe Solution Driving School offered classes "at numerous satellite locations in order to serve a larger geographic area." Our classroom was at the end of a deserted corridor in the basement of the Mackleby-Warner department store. At first I thought the basement looked like the set of a slasher movie: the gray tub filled with naked mannequins and spare body parts was the place where the killer hid his victims. Empty plastic hangers stacked to the ceiling on tall, metal poles, and straight pins covering the floor were instruments of torture. If you stepped on the pins just right, they could go through the sole of your shoe. The main level of the store was like part of the house visitors were allowed to see, everything clean and perfect, with no indication of what might be amiss (ominous music swelling in the background). One. Floor. Below.
I belong to the same generation as Whyman--Generation X--and I recognized the stops Miranda made in life. The book features movie references as well as music cues (The Pixies, The Clash, Radiohead, "Some Enchanted Evening," from the soundtrack of South Pacific) which breaks the rule that authors shouldn't name films or songs that readers may be unfamiliar with. I loved the places that Whyman's mind drifted to, such as a National Symphony performance where she notices her husband's binoculars trained on a gorgeous cellist Miranda refers to as "Brenda Starr." Based on her observations, Miranda judges Brenda is boning the conductor.
Paula Whyman, like both parents, was born and raised in the Washington D.C. area. She worked as a production editor assembling the DC Apartment Shoppers Guide and as an editor at APA Books. In 2000, Whyman earned her MFA in literature, with a creative writing focus, from American University. Her stories have been published in McSweeney's Quarterly, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review and The Washington Post and on NPR's All Things Considered. In 2016, she founded the online literary journal Scoundrel Time and serves as editor-in-chief. She resides in Bethseda, Maryland.
Previous reviews in the Year of Women:
-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
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Reading Progress
October 31, 2016
– Shelved
October 31, 2016
– Shelved as:
to-read
May 4, 2021
–
Started Reading
May 4, 2021
–
1.39%
"Our classroom was at the end of a deserted corridor in the basement of the Mackleby-Warner department store. At first I thought the basement looked like the set of a slasher movie: the gray tub filled with naked mannequins and spare body parts was the place where the killer hid his victims. Empty plastic hangers stacked to the ceiling on metal poles, and straight pins covering the floor were instruments of torture"
page
3
May 4, 2021
–
5.09%
"There are three genes whose proportionate presence determine a fly’s sex: One is called Sisterless; another is Sex-Lethal; the third is Deadpan. They sound like the names of punk bands: Deadpan, opening for the Sex Pistols. Sisterless, double-bill with Black Flag. I draw Punnett squares demonstrating how these three genes interact. As a female fruit fly, I would be Sisterless."
page
11
May 4, 2021
–
11.57%
"“We’ve decided to roll our wedding and honeymoon into one. We’re getting married in Bermuda!�
How did I know that? And with any luck, they will disappear in the Bermuda Triangle."
page
25
How did I know that? And with any luck, they will disappear in the Bermuda Triangle."
May 5, 2021
–
15.28%
"The bagels in the café were bland and spongy, but comforting, like chewing on my pillow. I’d sit there thinking and reading the newspaper and eavesdropping, and unconsciously tear off pieces of bagel, rolling them into pebble-size balls between my fingers before popping them into my mouth."
page
33
May 5, 2021
–
16.67%
"My apartment building was a modest brick mid-rise, remarkable only for its location across the street from the new Soviet Embassy compound. It was like living in a shack outside the walls of Emerald City. The Soviets had been allowed to build their embassy on the highest hill in Washington. Only the National Cathedral had a better vantage point for spying."
page
36
May 5, 2021
–
23.15%
"I read the program notes on the piece that had just begun—Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, Transfigured Night. I’d never heard it before. It struck me first as melodramatic, the musical equivalent of a Daphne du Maurier novel, ethereal violin arrested by the dark portent of bass."
page
50
May 6, 2021
–
80.0%
"“We should go back,� she said. “My husband will be looking for us.� But in the tiniest way, she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to stay with this strange man’s hand on her shoulder a little longer, to feel its ordinary kindliness, its undemanding, even indifferent, affection."
May 6, 2021
–
82.0%
"She wasn't surprised to end up in his office, but she’d always thought it would be about her son, not her daughter. There was a lesson in it: instead of worrying about the ones who didn’t fit in, you should worry about the ones who seemed to fit in too well."
May 6, 2021
–
90.0%
"I woke up one morning having transformed into a cockroach. One day I was my normal, within-bounds horny self, the horny self I’d lived with for decades, the one that fantasized over the good parts in A Sport and a Pastime and watched Paul Newman in Hud over and over. In what seemed like a day, I’d revved into a freakish sexual overdrive. I couldn’t look at a cucumber without getting excited."
May 6, 2021
–
93.0%
"Wesley and Kim had named their baby “Clementine,� as if they couldn’t wait to get rid of her. The last time we saw them, Clementine had been barely a month old. And I hadn’t been pregnant. I didn’t remember noticing her particularly. Before you had your own baby, those belonging to other people were like accessories, as if the parents said, “Look, here’s our new Turkish carpet; oh, and here's our new baby, too.""
May 7, 2021
– Shelved as:
fiction-general
May 7, 2021
–
Finished Reading
May 14, 2021
– Shelved as:
anthology
January 15, 2023
– Shelved as:
2016
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Kelli
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May 08, 2021 05:20AM
First off, I smile widely every time I read your intro about The Year of Women! I mean to tell you that every time I read your fantastic reviews. Additionally, Class of �87 in the house...so yes please to the Gen X and double that for the hometown Pixies, who were my soundtrack to life at a party school in the great state of Massachusetts. Adding this one right now. As always, thanks for your thorough, inciteful reviews.
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I wanted to much more for her, but isn't that the way it goes? No one gets what they deserve.A poignant observation, Joe. Yes. Your review really drew me in, and the comparison to Elizabeth Strout is enticing too. Thank you for introducing me to an author I'd never heard of before! (Would you believe I've never seen any of the Before trilogy?! For shame!)
Hooray for another excellent review by a fellow Gen X'er! I wasn't familiar with this book until your post, so thank you for bringing it to my attention.
I know South Pacific and "Some Enchanted Evening." Are you assuming that the only readers of this book will be Gen Xers who don't care for old Rogers and Hammerstein musicals or any other wonderful old movies? That would be a pity. Wonderful review, btw.
Kelli wrote: "First off, I smile widely every time I read your intro about The Year of Women! I mean to tell you that every time I read your fantastic reviews. Additionally, Class of �87 in the house...so yes please to the Gen X and double that for the hometown Pixies, who were my soundtrack to life at a party school in the great state of Massachusetts. Adding this one right now. As always, thanks for your thorough, inciteful reviews."Well, dang, Kelli. I couldn't have asked for more effusive or supportive blurb. Thank you. What a great time to grow up-- as long as nothing we did warranted a police report, our mistakes stayed in the '80s. If you enjoyed Olive Kitteridge and don't demand a "likable" protagonist, I think you'll enjoy this book.
Robin wrote: "Your review really drew me in, and the comparison to Elizabeth Strout is enticing too. Thank you for introducing me to an author I'd never heard of before!"Wonders never cease, Robin. This is the only book without an alien, robot or time traveler I'll introduce you to all year and I think you'd enjoy this one. It's worth mentioning that Whyman worked as an editor or contract writer for at least eight years before deciding to get her MFA, which she credits for moving her writing career forward. At the very least, it enabled her to write a book about something other than an MFA student writing a book.
Robin wrote: "I've never seen any of the Before trilogy?! For shame!)"
You're in for a treat. Lest you think these are cute romantic comedies--which have their place--my high school friend and I talk about this trilogy often, particularly the ending of the second movie and why it's so perfect. A new entry has been in theaters every nine years since I was in college and I really hope that in spite of the pandemic, we get a fourth one in 2022.
Regina wrote: "Hooray for another excellent review by a fellow Gen X'er! I wasn't familiar with this book until your post, so thank you for bringing it to my attention."Thank you, Regina. You've encouraged me to start a Gen X shelf. Other than Generation X, Girlfriend In a Coma and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, I can't think of anything else to go on it right now, though.
Anne (on semi-hiatus) wrote: "Are you assuming that the only readers of this book will be Gen Xers who don't care for old Rogers and Hammerstein musicals or any other wonderful old movies? That would be a pity. Wonderful review, btw."I think everyone can enjoy a good book or musical regardless of their generation. Being born 1965-1980 is not a requirement for this one. Thank you for coming out of semi-hiatus to comment, Anne!
You had me at Olive. Sounds like one I must add! Fantastic review!
Debbie wrote: "You had me at Olive. Sounds like one I must add! Fantastic review!"Thank you, Debbie. I must stress that You May See a Stranger is not Olive Kitteridge in terms of content. This is Rated R for drugs, drinking, pervasive language, sexual content, reckless behavior and mayhem. The similarity is in structure.
