After the bubblegum beachscape of this summer’s frivolous assortment of Girls’ Guide How-Tos comes a refreshingly devastating collection of stories about how not to. Focusing her perceptive eye on what happens when relationships go awry, Marian Thurm ushers her readers through a desperately needed coming-of-age for chick lit.

In What’s Come over You?, her latest collection of stories, this lithe wordsmith — who’s been lauded for her previous books, which include The Clairvoyant and Henry in Love — drags us into the sad romantic afterworld, the space left behind when " forever after " cracks open. In this bleak modern landscape, marriages wilt, hooking up isn’t the end of the story, and people screw up. Realistic, n’est-ce pas?

Consider it Lucinda Rosenfeld’s What She Saw plus 10 years, Candace Bushnell’s Four Blondes minus the Manolos, Bridget Jones padded with an extra 15 pounds. Thurm is 49 now, but she’s always had a reputation for covering the everyday rather than the fast lane. Here she offers an alternative to the current vogue — what chick lit might look like when it grows up. It may not be pretty, but its wrinkles and winces are authentic.

The 13 stories are all explorations of the worst-case scenario in matters of the heart: death, divorce, deception. Each is told from the perspective of a sad, dissatisfied protagonist — from the recently widowed to the sexually unfulfilled to the deserted single parent. In the first story, " Moonlight, " a rabbi learns of the break-up of his marriage when his wife brashly announces it to his congregation. In the last, " Miss Grace at Her Best, " a marriage of two young adults unravels when they are unable to decide which one will move out of his or her apartment. These are the stories of failure, of learning the hard way, of exhausting — often unnecessary — defeat.

The cumulative depressing bulk of these short stories would be morose if it weren’t so easy to sympathize. From the sexually needy senior citizen hungering after the hunk at the retirement community in " Housecleaning " to the recently widowed young woman trying to complete a home improvement project she and her perfect husband had fantasized about in " Pleasure Palace, " Thurm’s tales are compelling, painful, and mature. Her characters are people we know, their gestures are our own embarrassing memories, and their failures are the ones we’d like to experience behind closed doors.

Whether the damaged goods are male or female, 20 or 70, Thurm’s specialty is getting it, capturing the desires and disappointments of her characters. A suburban wife cheating on her husband for the first time with her daughter’s teacher is exhilarated, " electrified " even, by drinking orange juice directly out of the container. A family friend sitting shiva for a character’s grandfather is the type who " shows up cheerfully and faithfully at every funeral but rarely accepts invitations to anything else. " Recalling her husband’s having a meal in his hospital bed sprinkled with crumbs from his previous meal (he later drops into a coma), a young wife respectfully lets them lie. It is a powerfully loaded anecdote: " Crumbs littered the bedclothes, and if we’d been home, I would have gone after them with the Dustbuster. But since he was in the hospital (recuperating from a low white count that resulted from his chemotherapy treatments), I just let them stay where they’d fallen. " As her characters face no-win situations, Thurm spins them around in discomfort, forgiving them their mistakes, allowing them the occasional self-realization. The rosy hue of young fantasy has grown up and grayed; it’s mostly awkward, it’s often sad, but, most important, it’s always real.

In a market traditionally primed more for Bridget’s story than for her mom’s (who, if you remember, left her dad for the orange-skinned Infomercial hack in a decidedly dramatic twist), Thurm has cut herself a daring slice of population to explore. But she undertakes the potentially bleak task of exposing the romantic busts of baby boomers and beyond with elegance, intuitive ease, and interspersed moments of brutal reality and humor. The resulting chronicle of disappointments is anything but.

Issue Date: August 23-30, 2001