New West Book Review

Lonely Hearts: Steven Wingate’s “Wifeshopping”

By Jenny Shank, 7-07-08

Wifeshopping
By Steven Wingate
Houghton Mifflin, 208 pages, $12.95

The men in Steven Wingate‘s engrossing, entertaining debut story collection Wifeshopping are looking not just for love, but for marriage.  They’re not adverse to commitment, but they are particular, seeking the ideal woman for whom to forsake their days of youthful flings.  This ultimate woman never quite materializes for Wingate’s protagonists, who reject their girlfriends and fiancées because they don’t like used clothes or don’t agree that they should get rid of a stranger’s mementos found buried in the backyard.  But more often, their women reject them for being too pompous, for proposing marriage too early or for trying to rush them out of their rituals of mourning for past loves. 

Wingate, who lives in Lafayette, Colo. and teaches at the University of Colorado, sets his stories across the country, from Denver to Thermopolis, Wyo., to Rockport, Mass., to Miami (and vividly evokes each of these varied settings), but the problems that plague his characters are the same everywhere—they’re not-quite-perfect guys trying to create something lasting and meaningful with not-quite-perfect women.  Wingate writes all of his stories except one ("In Flagstaff") from the first-person perspective of his male protagonist, and even though the thought patterns of these men are similar, this approach never gets old, as Wingate writes in such an honest, humorous, insightful voice.

The collection is loosely organized by the state of commitment of its characters, from those at the beginning who don’t intend much more than a fling to those at the end who are engaged to be married (though none of them ever quite make it down the aisle).  But even the one-night-stand and summer love situations leave the characters wondering whether the women they were so casual in their dalliances with could have been the ones.  This is the case in “Beaching It,” in which an itinerant blacksmith who cuts a Paul-Revere-type figure for tourists begins an affair with a wealthy married woman that ends when a boy—who may or may not be a hallucination—spies on them when they are engaged in their favorite beach recreation.

I loved the atmosphere of “Me and Paul” (which won the 2006 Fiction Prize from The Journal), set in a hot springs in Thermopolis, Wyo., the sort of place where you encounter a lot of rambunctious kids loosely watched over by women with permanently tattooed eyeliner.  The unnamed narrator, passing through on his way back home to Denver, sees a “too-cute-for-her-age blonde” single mother shooting hoops with her son in one of the pools.  “The woman came from farm people, I could tell that just from looking at her arms and shoulders.” He chats her up, giving basketball pointers to her son, lying to her that his name is Paul and that he’s the wealthy proprietor of a vintage car outfit in Cherry Creek.  The story escalates as it becomes apparent how desperate for company the woman is, and she dumps her protesting son with his uncle and invites the narrator back to her trailer.  A sordid situation unfolds, and Wingate perfectly captures the shame, desperation, and sorrow of these briefly intertwined lives.

The equally strong “The Balkan House” tells the story of a going-nowhere bartender turned EMT who falls in love with a woman named Maura who is in the middle of a messy divorce.  They decide to move out of Miami together, and the narrator gives up his apartment, but then his girlfriend is sidetracked by legal delays with her divorce, and the narrator ends up living in the small Balkan House motel, run by an Iranian family.  As he waits for Maura to tie up her business, the narrator has nothing much to do, and he fixates on the teenage daughter of the Iranian family, “one of those achingly beautiful teenage girls who’s so pure and virginal that you want to build a temple around them.” She comes every morning to clean his room and, to his embarrassment, strip the bed of the sheets stained by his and Maura’s daily trysts.  As tension builds and the narrator’s shame about his situation grows, he interprets each miniscule interaction with the teenager, who looks at him with “half-judging, half-pitying eyes.” The narrator continues, “That’s the terrible thing about people with beautiful eyes, you can read any emotion in the world into them.  Plus some that aren’t in the world at all.” The story comes to a surprising yet believable crisis that will wrest narrator forever from his stasis.

Other standouts in Wifeshopping include “Meeting Grace,” in which the narrator introduces his fiancée to his mentally unstable sister, and “Bill,” in which a flea market enthusiast encounters a man named Bill selling his old clothes that happen to be in the narrator’s exact size.  The narrator buys piles of the clothes, much to his fiancée’s disgust, and comes to know more about the intense nature of Bill’s love for his dying wife and his harrowing reaction to her death than he ever wanted to.  “Knuckles” is a moving portrait of a man’s short-lived romance with a woman whose husband and son have recently been killed in a car accident.  In the funniest story, “Our Last Garage Sale,” an engaged couple carpooling to work with the Mapletons, a successful married couple, become pawns in the Mapletons’ revenge games when they suddenly announce they are getting divorced and are having a garage sale.  (The story also builds on the theme of the sad histories of second-hand belongings that Wingate weaves through the collection.)

Although I preferred some stories to others in Wifeshopping, there’s not a dud in the bunch, the entire collection carried by Wingate’s precise, yet natural diction and distinctive, winning voice.  Wifeshopping is the very promising debut of a new Colorado fiction writer from whom we can hopefully expect many more books to come.

Steven Wingate will discuss his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 30 at 7:30 p.m., and at Poor Richard’s Bookstore in Colorado Springs on August 7 at 5 p.m.

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