Review: Strangers in the House

Strangers in the House, by Dorothy Gallagher.
[rating:5/5]
This collection of short life stories is one of the favorite things I’ve read in a while. Gallagher gives you glimpses of a life well lived:

Joan. Now Joan was happy. She was pregnant and happy, she and Harold were happy. I said, “Joan, I’m so unhappy, what should I do?” She said, “Stop nagging him. Bob’s great. Maybe he’s a little erratic, but that’s the way he is. He’s brilliant.”
Yes, it’s true: you were erratic, brilliant, flying one minute, crashing the next, full of grandiose plans I didn’t understand, drinking too much, eating too much. And then somebody would put a spoke in your wheel at work, or I’d say, “Bob, you’re crazy, you can’t just build a hydrogen balloon…whatever!”

She talks of her family, who took a left turn back in the day:

Think of it: Moscow in the winter of 1936-37. The first of the purge trials had taken place the previous August, ending with the death penalty for all defendants. The second wave of terror was about to burst, and this time it would include Stalin’s agents in foreign countries, many of whom had received a summons “home.”
Whittaker Chambers was called “home” to Moscow in 1937; he stalled and began to plan his defection. Ignatz Reiss, a high-ranking NKVD agent who had worked for Soviet intelligence in Spain, was called “home,” broke with Stalin instead, and was assassinated in Switzerland. Walter Krivitsky, another high-ranking agent, defected after Reiss’s murder and was found dead in mysterious circumstances in Washington a few years later. Theodore Stepanovich Mally, a Hungarian who had served the Soviet cause since World War I, was summoned “home.” Ignantz Reiss’s wife asked Mally why he was going to certain death. Out of guilt, he told her: guilt for the terrible things he had seen and done in Stalin’s service.

I’ll tell you the truth. The reason I picked up this book was the Sylvia Plachy photo on the cover. It pulled me in and only later did I realize it was a Plachy. Gallagher runs in great social circles, literary and photographic. For the photographers, relate:

Every day, or at least several times a week, in various weathers and different hours, I planned to stand on Jersey Street with my camera, just to see what passed by. I never did that.
Too bad. Because a while ago I found myself on the corner of Jersey Street again. For old times’ sake, I stopped to look east toward Mulberry. It was a raw day in early spring. Fine rain fell from a polished pewter sky. At that very moment a nun in full regalia appeared on Mulberry Street. Three nuns followed behind her. Each nun carried a black umbrella. In the bright gray shadowless drizzle, they paraded in line past the pretty chapel of Old St. Patrick’s. Think of it: four nuns in black-and-white habit; four black umbrellas held aloft; four umbrellas, four nuns, all tilted at identical angles into the wind. i didn’t have my camera. In a moment they were gone. I felt sick. I had lost them.

Strangers in the House, by Dorothy Gallagher.
[rating:5/5]