The book opens with the O. Henry Prize–winning “Marital Problems.” An unnamed narrator and her husband, Victor, search for a dead bird their daughter has entombed within Victor’s estranged late father’s binocular case, while Victor rages over the incompetence of their contractor and the narrator distracts herself with sexual fantasies (both about the contractor and about her friend, a single mom). This story is a knockout—its characters are brilliant, their relationships meticulously muddled by conflicting impulses and passing fancies—and yet it does not overshadow the nine that follow. The theme of motherhood is especially prominent, a throughline from Romm’s The Mother Garden (2007). In the title story, Brown University student Elisa sells her eggs to a famous actress to secure an economic cushion for herself. After graduation, she uses the money to begin building her dream life in New York City, but, when headlines and photos of the actress and her daughter begin to circulate, Elisa is beset by the feeling that she’s done something terribly wrong. “What To Expect” also involves donated gametes—39-year-old Emily uses a sperm donor to start a family solo and, once she’s pregnant, decides to sell the unused sperm to a woman who used the same donor for her first child. An unexpected connection leaves Emily unsure whether she’s just feeling the baby fluttering about or if there might be true-love butterflies in there, too. Though this book is deeply sincere (the title is indeed self-descriptive), there are wry, even cheeky moments to be found: “A Gun in the First Act,” named for a Chekhov quote, flips an interview for an academic position on its head when shots are fired at the annual AWP conference. And of course, it helps that Romm’s prose is consistently swoonworthy: “We stand silently, all the possible words drying up, wicked back into the heavens to rain on someone else.”
RADICAL EMPATHY
