Editor Combines Modern Voices

PERSONALS

Edited by Thomas Beller

Houghton Mifflin

284 pp., $13

Personal ads can make for interesting reading. Brief, often disjointed attempts at self-description, the ads aim to present an entire person by mentioning several characteristics and interests. Now, imagine the typical personal ad. Expand it to 10, maybe 20 pages. Replace the desire to impress with a commitment to candor. Picture the ad being written by someone who aspires to be a professional writer. In such a transformation every characteristic, every interest that would be presented in the shorter ad, will be explained, analyzed, connected to other traits, to past experiences, to future aspirations. Put together twenty of these revamped personals ads, and the result is Personals, the book.

Personals thrusts the reader into a whirlwind of activity; amid the confessions and recollections, one enters the life of every one of the writers, knows each of them intimately, faces their problems and rejoices at the resolutions. Gathering the novel together, Thomas Beller asked each writer to write a story about something that matters to them. The result: a wide-ranging account of contemporary life. Almost as impressive as the sheer variety of topics and the sincerity with which they are presented, is the range of writing styles used to illustrate the points of the essays.

Writing about being a virgin at 25, one woman helps the reader feel to what extent her virginity has controlled her life by filling her essay with passion. Another contributor, also writing about losing control of his life, he with the help of heroin, allows himself to take a tone that is cooler and more detached because his experience is more commonly expressed and understood. A black writer, examining the conflict he feels between his race and his middle class upbringing, writes his essay largely in the second person, thereby splitting himself in two so as to allow for a dialogue. To show indecision, another writer breaks up her essay into brief passages, each presenting a separate thought on her decision not to have a child. Digging into the book, the reader meets a Vietnamese immigrant struggling with tradition, a young writer working in a bagel shop to pay rent, a college dropout discussing the problems of our education system and a woman with epilepsy. Statements on e-mail romances, corrupt politics and violence are all present, addressing the concerns of contemporary society. The novel's contributors comprise a fairly limited circle in that they share an obvious common trait: all are writers. What's more, almost all of them are intimately involved with New York City: some were born there, other moved to the big apple hoping to find a career or looking for a life. As a result, one of the book's most interesting aspects is its examination of life in New York.

Each of the writers finds something different in New York, but most seem to express sentiments similar to Heather Chase's description of the city as "largely populated by self-selected orphans, nomads and people with variable identities." New York emerges from the descriptions of the writers as lonely and forbidding, its people are career oriented and power hungry, interested in making connections rather than friendships. Whether it be a woman looking for marriage or a producer looking for patrons for an experimental theatre company, the writers encounter coldness and indifference. Some have escaped from New York for other destinations, hoping for a better future. Pretty soon a picture of New York emerges from the stories, and it is not a happy or a romantic picture.

The writers seem to spend a lot of time discussing universal themes, but sometimes their voices come through so much that it becomes impossible to identify with them; their experience seems too personal, too individual, to make sense to the reader. Others, however, manage to pull the reader quickly into their lives and by the end it is impossible to escape the feeling that some of these writers are close friends one has known for years. The universality of themes is fascinating, especially as it is often split among gender lines. Writing about life defining experiences, the women essayists tend, in most cases, to do so by discussing specific relationships with fathers, brothers, boyfriends, marriage or sex; their male counterparts, with few exceptions, barely touch on them at all, drawing self-definition from other sources.

At the heart of the collection lies detachment: e-mail, lying, heroin, dropping out of college, refusing to have a baby, reading through the New York Times wedding pages, working as a bar tender constantly apart from the customers. Each of these experiences is one of separation, of losing touch with humanity, each is a symbol of loneliness and sadness, sometimes even regret or despair. At the heart of this dehumanizing sentiment lies New York, and one cannot avoid the feeling that the authors are trying to blame their unhappiness on the city itself as if the buildings, the dark allies, the cabbies or the glamorous but cold parties were the root of every human problem. Detachment, perhaps the most universal theme of this century, leads slowly to despair, and New York becomes a depressing and unfriendly city.

Yet there is hope. Each of the writers has been chosen for this collection, and each of their stories is, on some level, a success story by virtue of that selection. While not every story has a happy ending or even a resolution, each one points to a struggle to keep writing, a decision not to give up. New York, therefore, becomes through the essays a city of hope that overcomes loneliness; Caitlin Cheevy, looking down at her newborn baby, writes: "Never have I felt a sweeter love." Her emotion redeems her city and breaks through the detachment of New York's generation of writers. Personals, like the ads that the book is named after, faces loneliness head on and tries, by all possible means, to overcome it.