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Travels with ZZ
The people of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere try to escape themselves
BY JOHN FREEMAN

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
By ZZ Packer. Riverhead, 256 pages, $24.95.


Story collections about escape often promise exotic backdrops, but not ZZ Packer’s debut. Sure, her itchy-footed narrators may fantasize about sipping coffee in Arabia or running libraries on desert islands. In reality, however, they spend most of their waking hours in cities like Baltimore and Atlanta, in neighborhoods where urban renewal is always an election cycle away.

All this blight takes a toll, and Packer reveals its fallout in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a dour but promising first work of fiction. In " Brownies, " a group of black Girl Scouts go away to camp. Instead of capturing tree frogs or pollywogs, they spend their days griping about a nearby troop of white girls, whom they imagine as haughty and pampered. In a dramatic final scene, they orchestra a showdown with their white sisters, only to realize that these girls aren’t conceited at all, just severely disabled.

Envy does funny things to a young mind, Packer suggests, and in other stories she shows how a steady diet of the stuff can make one a perpetual misfit. By most accounts, the narrator of the punchy title story is a success. She’s leapfrogged out of her poor black neighborhood into the ivy-clad cloisters of Yale. Once there, however, she does everything in her power to alienate everyone, rejecting other black students out of hand and the friendship of a woman because she’s gay.

Time and again, these characters refuse the solidarity of race in order to inhabit the more complicated dominion of their own selves. Packer is one of the first black writers to grow out of the PC revolution that swept college campuses in the ’90s, so you might expect her characters to embrace race, to wield it as a club. But though some do — the phrase " white girls " appears again and again — the majority wish they could turn the hullabaloo over color off.

In " The Ant of the Self, " a young debate whiz goes to Washington for the Million Man March only to be disappointed by the poor oratory of the speakers. " One should reiterate, not regurgitate, " he grumbles to himself. But the kid is also distracted by his deadbeat dad, who sees the gathering as a great opportunity to unload parakeets he bought as an " investment. " As the narrator wanders about angering one Nation of Islam suit after another, he spies his father hawking parakeets as if they were popcorn.

Here and elsewhere, Packer’s delivery is by and large humorless. " Our Lady of Peace " depicts a young woman’s attempt to teach English to a group of inner-city hoodlums. When this earnest teacher tells a student to stop braiding hair, she gets a roundhouse to the jaw. This sucker punch produced a cheer in me rather than a gasp — which speaks to Packer’s feelings about environment. Children from the hood are not saints, " Our Lady of Peace " suggests, but neither are those who go there with thoughts of saving them.

The only recourse to blight is reinvention, and Packer is at her best when she focuses on the perils of attempting just that. In " Geese, " a young woman goes to Tokyo and winds up moping around her apartment with three other roustabouts who live off petty thievery. Packer shows how her narrator’s bitter misery is merely an extension of what existed for her back home in the states.

" Travel is a fool’s paradise, " Emerson wrote long ago, before travel became more common than letter writing. In many ways, this is the lesson Packer’s characters learn over and over. The sad thing is that, for these lost souls, travel is often all they’ve got.

ZZ Packer reads at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner, tonight (March 27) at 7 p.m. Call (617) 566-6660.

Issue Date: March 27 - April 3, 2003
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