![]() ![]() Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. Julie Myerson's most recent novel is Something Might Happen (Cape).Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. She makes it look like all she did was take a little chunk of real life and crumble it up in her fingers and sprinkle it on the page. Dangerous, of course, because, like all great writers, Packer makes it look easy. You finish the book with a mad sense that, in writing, anything is possible. Something about Packer - her lack of pretension, her shy wit and spark - is infectious. ![]() I laughed and was entertained, but I was also oddly inspired. The warm pleasure of these stories lies not in anything they show or tell us, but in the brave, original way they do it. Mostly she resists, and I think I prefer it when she does. The narrator of "Brownies" admits at the end of the story that she "suddenly knew there was something mean in the world that I could not stop", which is the closest Packer comes to nudging us to draw a conclusion. That's perhaps because the endings go the way of real life - pretty much all over the place. You lurch after her in her wake, snaking this way and that, and yet you still can't begin to guess how she will end a story. Best of all, Packer's happy to leave things untidy. ![]() Description and similes - so often abused by first-time writers - are employed with urgency, grace and humour. Everything, you feel, is tight and meant. There's not a slack phrase or a boring paragraph in this collection. Well, she tackles her narratives with unswerving confidence, taking liberties with time and space, diving into a story at any point she fancies, dropping you right into the centre of a moment if so inclined. There's nothing especially new about any of this territory, but it's the way Packer explores it. As an unlikely friendship develops between the narrator and the not-quite-out-of-the-closet gay Heidi, the story's natural warmth and unresolved tensions envelop you. They also get her a friend, in the shape of fat, white, miserable, poetry-spouting Heidi. As sturdy and satisfying in tone as a short novel, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" tells of Yale freshman Cynthia, whose casual remarks about guns get her her own room and "a year's worth of psychiatric counselling". But the strongest story is the title one. The rug is whisked from under their feet when they discover that their intended victims are special needs kids. In "Brownies", an all-black Brownie troop away at camp decide to creep up on a troop of white Brownies who are "ponytailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love and money" and "teach them a lesson" for a racial insult they inflicted. They may be wayward but they are essentially good - honest and funny and scathing. What they have in common is that they're grafting away on the edge, struggling to fit in, to decide or define for themselves who or what they are. They are mostly bright - even destructively or mischievously so - but not necessarily educated. These are long-ish stories about young people - mostly (but not exclusively) women, mostly (but not exclusively) young black women. I don't think I can remember where I last encountered a debut collection that so justified its existence, that buzzed with so much credibility and attitude. Here in this one skinny volume is all that heat and wit and intuitive naturalness, all those subtle and instinctive tricks you just can't teach. ZZ Packer's thrillingly assured and altogether delightful first collection of stories goes some way to answering that question. ![]()
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