Suburban blight

Despite all the truisms about comfort and normalcy, suburbia is one of America’s most gothic settings, providing the backdrop for works of soul-pickling dread (Revolutionary Road) and haunting bemusement (Donnie Darko). Joining the long tradition of cul-de-sac malaise is Rachel Sherman’s debut, The First Hurt, a collection of stories that make a beeline for the darker corners of apparently quiet households. Her laser-cut narratives feature a teacher who beds a student, a married couple struggling to hide their twin infants’ birth defects and a high-schooler who strikes up a pen-pal relationship with an Iraq War soldier prone to pornographic outbursts.

“There’s a certain facade in the suburbs that doesn’t exist in the city, and the undercurrents can be really scary and gritty,” the 30-year-old author says while sipping pinot noir at the Stonehome Wine Bar, near her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “There’s a lot of space for people to do bad things.” Full of locked doors and unchanneled desire, Sherman’s stories are concerned with the contrasts between the visible and the hidden. Many of her characters are physically marred—one teen heroine has severe acne, another has two unseemly birthmarks on her face. But while these exterior traits are the source of awkwardness, Sherman is more interested in amplifying her narrators’ thriving interior lives. The pothead teen of the title story, who calls herself “the most secret of cheerleaders,” watches her school’s football team and thinks, “They are boys I would not mind in a large, anonymous soup.”

Sherman, who grew up in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island and cites novelist David Gates and The Ice Storm (the movie more than the book) as inspirations, writes in a style that manages to be full of longing without being over-the-top. “I hate pretentiousness,” Sherman says, and The First Hurt bears out this disdain with artful subtlety. Full of great, quirky lines, the book would be a good read even if it did condescend to its flawed characters, but it doesn’t. Instead, it takes the constraints of its context seriously, wondering not how its characters will escape—their bodies, their boring neighborhoods, their unreciprocated lust—but how they’ll behave when they can’t.

The First Hurt (Open City, $13 paperback) is out now.