Secrets Mar The Gloss Of 'Youth' For These Heroines
"I breathed in deeply," the narrator says in one story, "but when I exhaled, no air seemed to come out, like something inside me had eaten it."
There are one or two duds in here. When you can tell van den Berg spent more effort writing than storytelling, they become a little brittle. But after the first story, when the book gets rolling, she's completely on her game.
My favorite was the last piece, which also happens to be the title story. It's about a pair of identical twins, one wild, one dull, who barely talk to each other. We find out the wild sister once tried to steal the plain one's husband. But now she needs her twin to swap lives for a couple days, in order to fool a drug lord. And the ensuing events are full of delicacy and surprise.
Plenty of authors write with this sort of detachment. It can be divisive, sometimes too cool to love. I'm thinking of Joan Didion, Mary Robison, and, again, Murakami. But for those of us who do love them, Laura van den Berg is a new name to add to the list.
Read an excerpt of The Isle of Youth