Biography

A lifelong New Englander, Edith Pearlman was born and raised in a middle-class suburb of Providence, Rhode Island. Her father was a Russian-born doctor, her mother Providence-born and Polish American. Pearlman was a precocious child, learning to read at four and bicycling to the local library each week to replenish her store of books. Pearlman’s father died of cancer when she was in her teens. Pearlman studied literature at Radcliffe College and attended a class with novelist John Hawkes at Harvard University. She began to write short stories as an undergraduate, winning a national prize for her work. After graduation in 1957, Pearlman took six months off to write, living on her winnings from the television quiz show Tic-Tac-Dough. When the money ran out, she got a job as a computer programmer, entering code on a Teletype machine. She remarks of this work, “It had much in common with writing fiction because of the various choices you had to make. Every word had a specific function and could not be misused or misplaced.” She worked in the field at an IBM subsidiary for ten years.

Pearlman married Chester Pearlman, a psychiatrist and amateur musician, in 1967. She continued reading and writing, took two more writing classes, and published her first story in 1969. She likens her husband to a “Renaissance patron,” who subsidized her writing in exchange for childcare and housework. Although she never pursued a graduate degree in writing, she participated in a monthly nonfiction writers’ group and a writing partnership with the Cambridge author Rose Moss, both of which continue to the present day.

Although Pearlman has been dubbed an overnight sensation, mainstream success eluded her for much of her life. It was not until 1996 that Pearlman published her first collection, Vaquita and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature. Her next books were also published by small presses: Love Among the Greats: Stories (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), awarded the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and How to Fall: Stories (Sarabande Press, 2005), recipient of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Pearlman did not fully emerge from obscurity until the publication of Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books, 2011), the first book ever to be a finalist for four national honors at once: the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, which it won. She also received the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Honeydew: Stories (Little, Brown 2015) is her first publication by a major press. It was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and The Washington Post and Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal.

A prolific writer, Pearlman has published more than 250 short stories and essays in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and online publications. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection—Best of the Small Presses. In addition, her nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation, Yankee Magazine, and Ascent. Her travel writing has been published in the New York Times and elsewhere.

Pearlman has lived in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, since graduating from college. She and her husband have two children, a son and daughter, and one grandson.

Analysis

In her story “Fishwater,” Pearlman offers an ars poetica of sorts. The work of an eccentric “fictohistoriographian” is described as “the most economical way of explaining what cannot be explained in a briefer way.” Pearlman, too, is a master of economy. She has dedicated her literary gift not to writing grand, messy novels, but to the short story, each of which is a gem of compression and concision. She explains, “I have a temperament that shies away from big-scale projects. It prefers instead the small tale, worked over and over again [. . . .] It takes a lengthy and sustained effort to be brief; I enjoy that paradox.” “Explaining what cannot be explained,” as Pearlman puts it, is the fiction writer’s bread and butter; her fiction probes at the untidy mysteries of love, grief, joy, and loss, which no science has yet accounted for.

The modesty of Pearlman’s chosen genre seems to complement her abiding interest in “accommodation,” the survival strategy and practical philosophy of many of Pearlman’s protagonists. Weathering losses both personal and historic, they improvise lives for themselves—perhaps not the lives they dreamed of, but ones that are “happy enough.” In “Honeydew,” the final story in the collection of the same name, an anorexic girl longs for the weightless corporeality of an insect. Hoping to soothe her, her headmistress observes, “Life could be moderately satisfying even if you were born into the wrong order.”

Pearlman has been compared to Alice Munro, John Updike, and Anton Chekhov. For most of her career, her stories have been models of classic form and minimalist rigor. Honeydew, however, marks a shift from domestic realism to fabulism. The pacing is brisker and the characterizations have the iconic resonance of myth rather than modern psychology. Pearlman acknowledges this shift, remarking, “It seems the minimalists have had their day and the mild magic realists, whose ranks I sometimes join, are more numerous. What someone rather nastily called stories of dreary little insights are on the wane.” “Castle Four,” also from Honeydew, takes place in a hospital, a Gothic pile nicknamed the Castle. The building’s “medieval” aura seems to infect the omniscient narrator, who characterizes the hospital’s denizens as “ladies-in-waiting, crones, and knights.”

The Castle is located in Godolphin, the fictional Boston suburb where many of Pearlman’s stories are set. Modeled on Brookline, Pearlman’s adopted hometown, Godolphin offers Pearlman a seemingly endless supply of characters and plots. Pearlman remarks, “Godolphin is not microcosmic or generic. It is particular and peculiar.” Discovering reoccurring characters and locales is one of the special pleasures of reading Pearlman. Just one example: the staff and patrons of Donna’s Ladle, a soup kitchen, make an appearance in nearly all Pearlman’s books.

Vaquita and Other Stories is Pearlman’s first published collection. When her agent’s attempts to sell Pearlman’s three manuscripts to major publishers failed, Pearlman herself entered them in literary contests. Her efforts were rewarded when Vaquita and Other Stories won the 1996 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, judged by novelist Rosellen Brown. Stories in the collection were originally published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, Commentary, and other venues. Of the book, Pearlman writes, “My characters are people in peculiar circumstances aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they’ll at least Do Their Own Thing Right.”

In the title story, later included in 20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, a Holocaust survivor rises to prominence as minister of health in an unnamed Central American dictatorship. She faces imminent deportation with equanimity; after all, “she’s been living on God’s time” since the war. The story unites two of Pearlman’s perpetual subjects—postwar Jewry and struggling Central America nations—and the resilience that characterizes both.

“Inbound” shifts dramatically between the points of view of a gifted child and her harried mother. At story’s end, the narrative flashes forward as the girl intuits her fate: a happy life, albeit one yoked forever to that of her disabled sister’s. Here, again, we see Pearlman’s fascination with adaptable characters who wear their difficult burdens lightly. Pearlman’s genius for compression is evident throughout Vaquita; of the fifteen entries, few are longer than three thousand words.

Love Among the Greats won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Containing thirteen stories and numbering a mere one hundred and fifty pages, the collection affirms Pearlman’s ability to convey character, time, and place in a few expertly chosen words. Like Pearlman’s other collections, it ranges over diverse settings, from Boston to Jerusalem. The title story is one of three focusing on Michal, who journeys from the Midwest to Boston. In “Allog,” later anthologized in The Best American Short Stories (2000), a Filipino caregiver joins the denizens of a Jerusalem apartment building. Deftly juggling varied characters (including the former lover of Vaquita, title character of Pearlman’s previous collection), the story offers a communal portrait of modern Israel. Pearlman’s Israel is haunted by recent history even as it confronts an increasingly multicultural present: the shadow of the Holocaust hangs over some characters, while others are condescended to by European-born neighbors. “Chance,” too, reckons with the legacy of the Holocaust. Centering on members of a Torah study group whose sole communal activity consists of weekly poker tournaments, the story traces the adolescent narrator’s dawning maturity. The title refers to the game itself and also, notes Pearlman, to “the destruction of Jewry. . . . [I]t was chance that some Jews lived and some died.” This story, too, was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories (1998).

The much-lauded Binocular Vision was heralded as Pearlman’s breakout success. Reviewers marveled at Pearlman’s lack of critical recognition and celebrated her belated arrival on the literary scene. Collecting previously published and fresh work dating from 1977 to the present, the hefty volume introduced new readers to Pearlman’s breadth and depth of vision. Settings range around the globe; characters represent diverse ages, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Pearlman’s superior craft is evident: breathtaking concision, daring shifts in point of view and chronology, and large casts of characters deftly managed.

Three linked stories (“If Love Were All,” “Purim Night,” “The Coat”) trace the journey of Sonya Sofrankovitch, a middle-aged American with fading prospects, first to London, then to a Displaced Persons camp in newly-defeated Germany. She survives the Blitz, falls in love with several children, and finds an unlikely mate. Sonya is an archetypal Pearlman heroine—spirited, clever, and resilient. She is also, in the words of her future husband, “accommodating,” weathering personal loss and historical tragedy with tactical optimism.

The collection closes with “Self-Reliance,” chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories (2006). Here, a terminal cancer patient chooses suicide over another round of chemotherapy treatments. Pearlman describes the woman’s drugged final musings in lush prose, then abruptly shifts to the perspective of the neighbor who discovers her corpse. The effect is devastating, suggesting how few are the resources of the “self” when facing illness and death.

The first of Pearlman’s collections to be published by a major New York house, Honeydew was met with broad critical acclaim. Pearlman’s enduring gifts are on full display here: the masterful craft and sophisticated moral vision, warm regard, and subtle wit. Many of Pearlman’s perennial subjects reappear: the long shadow of the Holocaust, loved ones stricken with illness, resourceful older women. Of the twenty stories included, more than half take place in Godolphin, a fictional Boston suburb modeled on Brookline, Massachusetts.

In the formally perfect “Hat Trick,” a widowed mother dares her daughter and her young friends to marry the men whose names they pick from a hat. “The best matchmaker in the universe,” she explains, is “chance.” To her surprise, the girls take her up on the dare, producing marriages that are “happy enough.” As critic James Wood notes, Pearlman’s “dearest subject may be adequate happiness.” Chance, too, is given its due. Who better than a young widow to understand the role of chance in making and unmaking human happiness?

Pearlman is generally categorized as a realist: her stories take place in our empirical reality. However, several of the stories in Honeydew fall under the rubric of magic realism. “Wait and See” tells of a boy burdened and blessed with “pentachromacy,” the (fictional) ability to see colors invisible to the normal human eye. Literal folktales make an appearance, too: in the same story, the boy’s Jamaican-born stepfather recounts an Anansi tale. Other stories adopt a fairytale-like tone, as in “Castle 4.” This foray into fabulism constitutes a literary departure for Pearlman, moving her in a new and intriguing direction as she enters her eighties.

Summary

After decades of laboring in near-obscurity, Pearlman became a literary sensation at the age of seventy-five. With five published books under her belt and more than 250 stories published in smaller venues, Pearlman has arrived. She has been hailed as “America’s greatest living American short story writer” and compared to masters of the short story form such as Chekhov and Munro. Both local and international in sensibility, she has put her odd and particular slice of Boston on the literary map and traced the lives of postwar diasporic Jewry around the globe. No matter where her tales take her, each bears Pearlman’s distinctive signature: boundless curiosity, sparkling wit, and narrative buoyancy belying moral gravity of the highest order.

Bibliography

By the Author

Vaquita and Other Stories, 1996

Love Among the Greats: Stories, 2002

How to Fall: Stories, 2005

Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, 2011

Honeydew: Stories, 2015