Joan Frank. Boys Keep Being Born. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. 161 pp.

Using stories originally published in such literary magazines as Salmagundi, South Carolina Review, and Ohio Review (not to mention Kennesaw Review May 2000), Joan Frank has made a book whose title sets up expectations undercut by the stories themselves. That is, although she pulls no punches at male transgression, she neither collapses nor charges into the glib man-hating that we might anticipate from the title’s grudging, tautological declaration.

Slashing through façades of men’s and women’s relationships, Frank has located a special balance-point of observation and insight between T.C. Boyle and what once was called Redbook fiction. She wittily satirizes a world somewhere WestCoast of Sex and the City, where “self-ironic” (a term Frank uses several times) describes both her characters and her author-narrator and where everything in the culture of relationships is up for re-interpretation:

It was as if he had never been substantial enough in himself to stand for anything, so that he became startled and fawning when he was near those who actually did. It was easier—safer—to stand behind them, be a kind of livery to them, back a few notches from the action. This stance could be called respect. It was more, Jane realized, a kind of fear. (13)

The title of her first story, “Exhibit A,” suggests that we ought to read with objective eyes, suspending details of plot and other executions of craft until the whole “show” be seen, after which we might pass judgment or perhaps be left, leaning slightly toward an “Exhibit B,” as if, in a dark stairwell, we weren’t positive that we’ve reached the bottom or top step. We are led in by the hand—“The witness to this story was a woman”—and in the first few paragraphs we are enlisted almost as a jury by second-person eruptions: “What is it with these sorts in cities?”; “You marvel”; “Let us say he was creative director in a hip young advertising firm.” But we are like a jury of art critics rather than the civic judiciary, being called not to judge dispassionately but to be caught tilting in directions coaxed rather than compelled.

It’s an odd style, I think—smart and restrained without being coldly superior, and Brechtian, at times, with vernacular stage directions: “Now pour in some time.” Like the narrator, these are West Coast Ann Beattie characters without the chilly Northeastern undercurrents, something far less Puritan in its basic rebellions, something far more loosely-rooted but nonetheless striving to build its own morality. At the end of “The Queen of Worldly Graces,” Jenny finally announces what she apparently understood all along about tolerating the broken-backed, pseudo-Romantic philosophy of her Tom and his fickle, irresponsible best friend, Cal:

“Get a life people say. A life doesn’t cringe. Too much cringing going on everywhere, to your thinking … . A life stands in its own shoes. Says ‘This is what is, sweetheart. No character transplants or plastic surgery coming your way.’” (55)

Robert W. Hill