cover image Winging It: A Tale of Turning Thirty

Winging It: A Tale of Turning Thirty

Elizabeth Tippens. Riverhead Books, $10 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-57322-528-1

This debut collection of readable interlocking stories has some funny lines about being female and single, but the main character's self-absorption, and passivity, bog it down. In the first story, an unnamed ""girl"" decides, on short acquaintance, to go to France with a married man and is distraught when a well-dressed hooker is ejected from a restaurant. When the characters gain names and the stories become more concrete, things improve. It turns out that the ""girl"" is Faith, an actress living in New York. In successive stories, as she moves through her 20s, she both tries to throw off her married paramour and make another relationship work. Some of her insights are sharp, but even those have an air of self-congratulation. For instance, when Faith encounters an old acquaintance who resented her high school popularity, she fights the urge to scream out, ""There is no more popular anymore."" Faith begins a relationship with Sandy, an ornithology student from the same small Virginia town, who she happens to meet one evening stocking the shelves at the Food Emporium. It's a stretch, but plausible until it turns out that Sandy moved to New York and took the grocery job in order to effect just such a meeting with his youthful crush. What's so all-out amazing about Faith? Who knows? Her career is taking off but she never seems particularly engaged by it; and the stories narrated from her point of view don't reveal a striking wit or intelligence. Even her looks, as revealed by her married lover's cool assessment of her legs (""sturdy and solid, but cute the way a cheerleader's legs were cute"") don't put her above the rank of mere mortals. Ultimately, these are fantasies about types rather than human characters. (May)