Tell Him You're Married — Stan Rogal

If the ghosts of Woody Allen and David Mamet were available (at this early date) to float through the fiction of one writer, that writer would have to be Stan Rogal. In linked short stories imbued with wry humor, brutally frank honesty and caustically banal dialogue, women and men argue, make love and taunt each other mercilessly. Parents and kids don't get along: We love you ... says a character in Hard Line to which his father responds: Bullshit. I'm going to kill myself tonight. And the son's response? A deadpan, You've said that before. People on the cusp of middle age, who should know better, play dangerous drinking games, as in Friends. And more than anything, the middle-aged narrator —just over a bad marriage and taking university-level drama classes to get over it— always seems to be surrounded by women willing to comfort him when he needs it: If you need me, says one of these women in the story Family, Come over. Anytime. I'll do anything you want. Anything. Reading Rogal's stories is like acting on this woman's proposition: so easy and so enjoyable. But like the world of theatre Rogal invokes in many of his stories, where it's sometimes hard to tell whether people are really good actors, or if they're actually feeling what they're telling you, the stories in Tell Him You're Married suspend your disbelief so effortlessly that you put the book down and marvel at the seduction that has been performed.