You Have a Friend in 10A

December 1, 2021

Author most recently of the Booker Prize short-listed Great Circle, Shipstead ranges worldwide in her first story collection, from a Pacific atoll to an Olympic village to star-spangled Paris. The scenarios include a Montana rancher, caught up in a love-hate triangle with his nephew and the young woman tending the horses, and an embittered novelist revisiting the failed romance that inspired his first novel, about to be published. As 10A was my first New York apartment, I am especially intrigued by the title story.

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Starred review from March 14, 2022
The 10 stories in this daring, wide-ranging debut collection from Shipstead (after the novel Great Circle) resonate as they leap across time and space. “The Cowboy Tango,” set at a Montana dude ranch, cruises through several decades as the complicated relationship between the ranch’s owner and a woman who works for him remains uncomfortably static, then changes radically upon the arrival of the owner’s nephew. “Lambs,” on one level a casual piece about the interactions of those at an artist’s colony in Ireland, is haunted by an eerie foreshadowing as each character is introduced with parenthetical summaries of their birth and death dates, which makes its ending both surprising and believable. The masterwork is the deeply unsettling “La Moretta.” Interspersed with segments from an enigmatic inquisition, it documents a honeymoon excursion gone horribly wrong. Here and throughout, Shipstead demonstrates a remarkable ability to interlace the events of ordinary life with a mythological sense of preordained destruction. Both formally inventive and emotionally complex, this pays off with dividends. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger, Fletcher and Co.

March 15, 2022
Ten stories from the apprenticeship of a novelist. Last year, Shipstead published Great Circle, an ambitious novel far more complex than her earlier work. This collection of short stories, mostly written in grad school at the Iowa Writers Workshop and all previously published in literary journals, takes us backward rather than forward. Experimenting with a range of styles, subject matter, and effects, the collection is uneven. Shipstead was still in her 20s when the first story, "The Cowboy Tango," was selected by Richard Russo for Best American Short Stories 2010. A slow-burn love triangle set on a dude ranch in Montana, its unusual female protagonist could be seen as a foremother of the aviatrix in Great Circle, with her difficult childhood, independence, capability, and powerful internal compass. Similarly, the narrator of the title story seems a prototype of the other main character of Great Circle, a troubled young movie star. "I'm told I went catrastic for the first time in 1984, when Jerome Shin (yes, the director) took me up to my bathroom--my gaudy childhood bathroom with the big pink Jacuzzi and mirrors on all four walls--and cut me my first line and asked me to hold his balls while he jerked off." Catrasticis a neologism from a Scientology-like cult the narrator becomes involved with, marrying the megastar who is its most famous acolyte. And catrastic? It's when degradons damage your Esteem, probably because you've gotten involved with a Usurper. Weirdly, this satire contains a plotline about a plane carrying home the body of a young veteran (our movie star is in seat 10A), an element which does not fully succeed. However, good writing and funny observations about sex are found throughout. From "Backcountry": "Back in her teens, Ingrid had learned that ejaculation sometimes emptied men of a certain animating humanity. The energies they used to attract women in the first place--attentiveness, empathy, vitality--were commandeered and diverted by their bodies toward the essential project of replenishing their testicles, and they became lumpen and taciturn." Not the next novel we were waiting for.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022

In this follow-up to her Booker short-listed Great Circle, Shipstead displays luminous, exacting language as she demonstrates her flair for creating distinctive characters who deal more or less successfully with what life has handed them. A teenage girl fleeing an ugly home situation ends up as a horse wrangler, appreciating the man who hires her though she cannot return his love. A newbie novelist is only beginning to realize what a pretentious jerk he was in graduate school. In the standout "Souterrain" ("subterranean" in French), feckless Iris inherits a house in Paris from her blind grandfather, Pierre, and a story unfolds of a family tragedy during World War II; Pierre's guilt over his inadvertent role in events, despite his youth; the painfully suppressed past of his housekeeper, Madame Harmou; and the tragic misunderstanding that dooms her son. Here as elsewhere, the characters' lives are shaped by unexpected or hidden events, large and small, and in the end Pierre's memories "will join the dark matter that surrounds the living: the memories of the dead, undetectable but still exerting force." VERDICT Essential for fiction lovers.

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Starred review from April 1, 2022
Acclaimed author Shipstead (Great Circle, 2021) turns her considerable talent to the short story, offering readers this sweeping collection crafted over the course of a decade. With some stories formally workshopped and others written in isolation, the resulting collection is an effortlessly transporting and piercing journey. Stories focus on those innate, immutable, and deeply rooted human characteristics within us all that we perhaps wish were a bit more malleable. An ego-driven author looks at the success of his peers as a refutation of his own talent; a thrice-married dad drags his bohemian daughters to clean out his father's home; after a decade of unrequited love, a rancher resolves a rash decision: these focused yet complex characters and others populate You Have a Friend in 10A. While there's no shortage of compelling characters and penetrating insights, the book's title story is one of its strongest, as an amenable actress is charmed into, then out of, an isolating pseudoscience-based religion (thinly veiled Scientology). Reaching across decades and set in a diverse array of locations both domestic and exotic, Shipstead's latest will find a home on bookshelves next to the work of Andre Dubus III, Jane Smiley, and Richard Russo.

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