Rating: 
Summary: A Truly Stunning Debut for ZZ Packer
Review: ZZ Packer has channeled the voice of the outsider. Nothing particularly revelatory happens in her new collection of eight short stories, at least nothing that significant on the face of things. A Brownie troop nearly incites a brawl. A freshman Yale loner with a "suicide single" connects with a pudgy white girl. An ex-patriot American starves in Japan. Packer's very real, fairly troubled protagonists share the feeling of being out of place in their current environs, with dreams of something perhaps bigger and definitely better. None are anything out of the ordinary. And yet, each of the stories in DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE, chronicling bits and pieces of the African-American experience, is extraordinary.The standout in this group is the title story, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere." The title refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much. After Dina makes the dean's dubious watch list for naming a revolver as the inanimate object she'd most like to transform into during Yale freshman orientation, she becomes a sort of self-made outcast. When she meets Heather, a doughy fellow frosh who can't stop crying over a bad night with a new guy, Dina gradually learns to let her in and wonders if their relationship is something more than just platonic. Like all of Packer's stories, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" offers no hard and fast finale. Dina may or may not be gay. She may or may not be using her outcast status at Yale as a way of coping with her mother's death. She may or may not be the same protagonist, again a black loner named Dina, who alienates her roommates by eating the last slice of grapefruit in the later story, "Geese." Another standout story in this collection is "Speaking in Tongues," in which a Sunday school-ish 14-year-old runs away to Atlanta and is taken in by a [sex abuser.] It would be very easy for the characters in this story to be portrayed as caricatures --- the naïve innocent, the man who takes advantage of her, the hardened street girl saving for a way out who ultimately rescues the young heroine. But Packer's nuanced portrayals paint each character a shade of gray. She is an author who presents the facts as she sees them and lets her audience draw their own conclusions, an all-too-lost art in a John Grisham world. Packer's characters are often, though not always, very smart. Many are struggling to rise above their circumstances, yet they feel trapped by things beyond their control: their parents, their faith and their jobs. Several of Packer's stories examine religion with a somewhat jaded eye. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a lecherous preacher molests a fervent congregant. At the end, the man she hopes to save reveals himself to perhaps be her savoir. Again, Packer lets the readers decide. Most of these stories had already appeared in various magazines and short story collections before being gathered for DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE. It's truly a stunning debut. Here's hoping that Packer's next work, be it more stories or a novel, comes quickly. --- Reviewed by Toni Fitzgerald
Rating:
Summary: Smart People Surrounded by Fools=Great Stories
Review: ZZ Packer's masterful stories deal with the crisis of belonging that many African-Americans face because, as individuals, people of all races, including their own, have monolithic expectations of them, which their individuality defies. Packer's characters break out of any kind of preconceived molds and faced with Groupthink, pressures to conform, and the patronization and condescension of liberal whites, these characters become infuriated by the stupidity that surrounds them. The style of the stories is intensely realistic, often satirical, bitter, nihilistic. At the same time Packer brings a deep humanity, complexity, and sympathy to her cast of misfits, all who search for belonging and never find it. In "Brownies" African-American girls stir a brouhaha with a dubious charge of having heard a racial epithet uttered by the white Brownies. The story in many ways is a funny and disturbing exploration of Groupthink whereby the black Brownies never really heard the epithet but get caught up in the self-righteousness and mission of their revenge. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a cross-eyed, homely lady, Clareese, plays by the rules, reads her Bible, and works hard as a nurse, only to be exploited by her church deacons who use her as a door mat. We cringe as we watch Clareese sink deeper and deeper into loneliness. In "Our Lady of Peace" a young woman takes on teaching in a public school in order to change nihilistic, lawless high school children, but in a reversal, the children make her a nihilistic misanthropist. The teacher Lynnea Davis not only begins to despise the children, but the teachers she works with. In the "Ant of the Self" a precocious teenage boy named Spurgeon must face the dilemmas of having an alcoholic bully of a father who drags his son to the Million-Man March where Spurgeon, the innocent party, is berated by rhetorically-inflamed black men to respect and love and appreciate his father for taking him to such a great event when in fact his hustler of a father simply took him to the march in order to sell a bunch of stolen exotic birds. In "Speaking in Tongues" a young girl runs away from home where her overly pious aunt subjects her to the abuses of a dysfunctional, abusive church. However, running away to Atlanta to find her mother, the young girl discovers that the secular world-full of pimps, hustlers, and libertines-offers no refuge. For all the diversity of these stories, we can see Packer's general themes-her animosity against Groupthink, her loathing of convenient stereotypical thinking, her objection to the use of religion and false piety in order to bully others, her disdain for the manner in which clichés offer people false solutions and self-aggrandizement. Packer is a major writer tackling major themes and I am eagerly awaiting her next publication.
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