Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo: A mixed bag of short stories

The journalist and writer Lisa Taddeo had a huge hit in 2019 with Three Women, a creative non-fiction book about female desire in contemporary America. A number one bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, the book is being adapted for Showtime. Last year Taddeo published her debut novel Animals, to mixed reviews, and follows it with her first short story collection, the fittingly titled Ghost Lover.

Seven of the nine stories have already been published, in publications ranging from McSweeney’s to Granta. Two have won a Pushcart Prize. A number of other accolades are also listed in the press material, including the Andrew Lytle Prize for the best short story published in 2018.

While some of the stories engage, as a whole the collection is a mixed bag. The primary issue is one of repetition, in style, theme, character and authorial voice. Some stories – the poignant Maid Marian, the powerful A Suburban Weekend – come close to greatness, tautly written tales of loss and unlikely redemption. Others are pale imitations, ghostly approximations of superior bedfellows. This kind of layering worked for Taddeo in Three Women (though she was criticised for the homogeneity of her subjects), but it is harder to pull off in a collection. The short story form is unforgiving. There is nowhere to hide.

At its best, the collection has shades of Mary Gaitskill, that great chronicler of the politics and psychology of desire in American society. Thematically there are similarities: debasement, boredom, desperation, longing. Recurring preoccupations in Ghost Lover include heartbreak, the callousness of online dating, inequality between the sexes – how it worsens with age – the rivalries of female friendships, dead fathers, the sexual abuse of minors by stepfather figures. On a sentence level, Taddeo’s collection is closer to her contemporaries, newer writers such as Kristen Roupenian and Lauren Holmes. All three have penned sharp, shocking stories about modern dating culture, the delights and degradations of that world.

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Taddeo knows how to write a killer sentence, full of ambiguity. She is particularly good on outsiders in relationships, the bit players – mistresses, lovers, exes who can’t quite let go. In the titular Ghost Story a successful businesswoman Ari pines for her ex: “Like someone who might take care of you forever, if you were open to denial.” In the mordant Forty-Two: “The day of a wedding is always about three people. The groom, the bride, and the person most unrequitedly in love with the groom or the bride.”

Frequently, however, she pushes things too far. A good metaphor should defamiliarise and then immediately connect – think of the masterful prose of Anne Enright – but if it doesn’t, the result can be puzzling or odd. Across the collection: “Her hip bone is a seatbelt … The moon is a bone in the shape of a hole … the information waggled her belly and chopped up her guts into the blunt mince of the sweetbreads she orders at Gramercy Tavern.” And in first prize: “Beauty never went out of style in the vacuum of the penis.”

The larger issue over the nine stories is that too many of the female characters think the same way, which is, we come to suspect, reflective of how the author thinks, diegesis as opposed to mimesis. It is, at the very least, reflective of a type of woman she wishes to portray, namely superficially minded, obsessed with looks, weight, jealous of younger, prettier females who may steal her limelight, or indeed her man.

Here’s the opening of Beautiful People: “When she heard that the Bosnian model with the tangled hair and the blue eyes died—heroin, Miami—Jane smiled … One less beautiful girl.” The initial pages of nearly every story contain some variation of this. “She wasn’t exactly beautiful,” says the narrator of Padua, 1966, when relating the story of a mother who chose to leave her husband and child. In Air Supply a woman recounts a seminal holiday: “When I was eighteen I took a trip with my friend Sara to Puerto Rico. Sara was—and still is—prettier than me, in a slutty 1990s kind of way.” At times Taddeo can be scathing of these women but not enough to establish an ironic distance between author and character.

With the closing story, A Suburban Weekend, we fear we are in similar territory: “Fern and Liv were always trying to decide who was prettier, hotter.” But what actually unfolds is a moving meditation on loss and the power of friendship to sustain through the hardest of times. Structurally tight and with moments of stunning resonance, it showcases Taddeo at her best: “She passed the antique mirror on the wall, which as a child she thought could reflect the demons in her soul. Now it said twenty-five dollars or best offer.”