Rent The Guy Not Taken: Stories

My trust and admiration were earned quickly by the seemingly effortlessness of the prose, acute observations of things and people rendered plainly, so as to make them familiar, and dialogue so natural you'd swear you were listening in at a keyhole. These stories investigate the struggle to trust in the promise of contentment, a balance of independence (personal achievement) and compromise (love or marriage), in the wake of childhood experiences of loss or neglect. Weiner's magic is in taking those everyday physical details--the tight jeans and pink, nubby sweater or striped tie and creased pants--that finds us unquestioningly and rapidly pigeonholing someone into a comfortable socio-economic box. Her characters may judge one another, but Weiner doesn't. Her empathy is as far-reaching as her talent. Hence, she is able to crush that comfortable box and show the dimensions of character that ***umptions flatten. The clean unadorned writing exposes, in a flash, stroke, or dribble of melted ice-cream, characters' complex emotional and psychological states. Because Weiner's stories are character driven, the handful of less successful stories roll characters thinly, priority shifting to plot device or, in some stories, I suspect, to 'fact,' the triggering experience still rooted too firmly to biography, unwilling to let the art take seed. But even in these, Weiner cannot contain those moments of brilliance that make a character so real we find ourselves looking for that harried mother juggling a baby and latte at our favorite coffee house or the drunk boyfriend counting beer rings at our local pub.