The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones

Julie Orringer
2003

Introduction

"The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones" by Julie Orringer was first published in the literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, in 2003. It was reprinted in Orringer's first collection of short stories, How to Breathe Underwater (2003). Orringer has been widely praised for her ability to convey the trials and tribulations of adolescent girls, as well as their ability to emerge successfully from the challenges they face. In "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones" a young Jewish girl from New York named Rebecca goes to stay for the summer with Esty, her cousin. Esty and her family are members of a Hasidic sect that has strict religious beliefs and practices which are quite new to Rebecca, who has been raised in a secular environment. As the summer wears on, Rebecca has to deal with her developing awareness of religion and God, as well as her emerging sexuality. These issues come together one hot July Shabbos and are connected with a forbidden book and the disturbing presence of an attractive young man.

Author Biography

Julie Orringer was born on June 12, 1973, in Miami, Florida. Both her parents were third-year medical students at the University of Miami. When Orringer was four, the family lived in Boston. When she was six, they moved to New Orleans, where she lived until she was twelve. She attended a private school, and being one of the few Jewish children in the class, she felt like an outsider. She loved reading and writing and thought she might like to write novels someday.

In 1986, the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Orringer attended a public school from eighth grade. The book that most influenced her at the time was Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which she read in high school. During Orringer's school years, her mother was fighting a long battle with breast cancer, the disease that eventually killed her. Orringer says this experience gave her an early awareness that she might lose her mother, and this feeling of insecurity, loss, and the possibility of death has colored her stories.

Orringer attended Cornell University, where some of her professors began to encourage her to pursue a career as a writer. During her junior year, she started reading all the contemporary fiction she could find, including Raymond Carver, Charles Baxter, Mona Simpson, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Alice Munro.

Orringer graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell in 1994. She decided to continue her study of writing at Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and graduated with a master of fine arts degree in 1996.

After graduation, Orringer moved to San Francisco where she undertook a variety of non-writing-related jobs in order to make money while reserving her creative energies for her fiction. In 1999, Orringer received a Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. By this time, her stories were being published in literary magazines and books, including the Barcelona Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best New American Voices 2001, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2002. "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones" was first published in Zoetrope: All Story. Nine of Orringer's stories, including "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," were published in the collection, How to Breathe Underwater, by Knopf in 2003. After graduating from the Stegner Program, Orringer held a three-year lectureship in fiction writing at Stanford.

As of 2006, Orringer is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College of California. She lives with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty, in San Francisco.

Plot Summary

"The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones" begins on a hot Friday afternoon in the middle of July in upstate New York. Rebecca, the narrator, a girl of about twelve or thirteen, is staying at the home of her uncle and aunt, the Adelsteins. Rebecca has been sent away while her mother recovers from the death of her infant son. That was six weeks ago, but she is still in hospital suffering from an infection and depression.

Rebecca's relatives are Hasidic Jews, whereas Rebecca's parents, who live three hundred miles away in Manhattan, New York City, are secular Jews. Rebecca's older cousin Esty, who is about thirteen, is very pious and tries to persuade Rebecca to be more observant of Jewish religious rituals and other customs.

Even though they are not supposed to be doing so, Rebecca and Esty wade into a lake and swim fully clothed out to a raft. They watch as a teenage boy comes along the lake road. He hides something under the porch steps of a house owned by the Perelmans, who are away until August. Esty recognizes the boy as Dovid Frankel and tells Rebecca that he and his family will be coming to Shabbos (Sabbath, the day of rest at the end of the week) dinner that evening at the Adelsteins.

After Dovid leaves, the girls swim ashore and investigate. Under the porch they find a paper bag and inside it is a book titled, Essence of Persimmon: Eastern Sexual Secrets for Western Lives. They read some of it but do not really understand it, and Esty says it is a sin to read it. But they agree to take the book home and hide it in the top shelf of their closet. Esty says they will not look at it, because that would be a sin.

They ride their bicycles home, hide the book, and help Rebecca's Aunt Malka with the preparations for Shabbos dinner. Rebecca makes a brief call to her mother in the hospital, but her mother sounds depressed, and their conversation ends before Rebecca has a chance to feel much connection with her.

At six-thirty, the female guests start arriving for Shabbos, bringing food and drink. The men are still at shul (a Yiddish word for synagogue). When Dovid arrives, Rebecca studies him carefully.

Everyone gathers around the table and the men sing "Shalom Aleichem." As they serve the food, the two girls keep their eyes on Dovid, although sometimes Rebecca looks at Mrs. Handelman, Dovid's older sister, who is pregnant. Rebecca's five little step-cousins scream as they run around and underneath the table. It is all very disorderly, quite different from the quiet dinners Rebecca is used to at home. At the end of the meal they all sing in Hebrew the Birkat Hamazon (a grace after meals), which again is something that does not happen at Rebecca's home.

Uncle Shimon then tells a story about a Jewish family thirty miles away whose house burned down in June. The only thing that was not destroyed was the mezuzah (scriptural passages in a box placed on doorposts). It was later discovered that there was an imperfection in the mezuzah; some of the letters of one of the words were smudged and misshapen. Uncle Shimon suggests that is why the house burned. Dovid expresses skepticism about this idea, and Uncle Shimon does not respond directly to his question, simply replying that he makes sure he has their mezuzah checked every year.

After dinner, Dovid steps outside, and after a while Rebecca follows him. For a few minutes they make desultory conversation about whether a smudged mezuzah causes a house to burn, and whether they believe in God at all. After Rebecca says that sometimes she hopes there is not a God because he would know all her secret thoughts, Dovid lets on that the Adelsteins are scared of her. They think that she may lead their children away from the orthodox religious path. This revelation surprises Rebecca, since she assumed the influence would be the other way round. Dovid then says that he is not scared of her, and he touches her arm. She knows that as an Orthodox Jew, he is not supposed to touch any woman who is not his mother or sister. For a moment she thinks he is going to kiss her, but then he walks back toward the house.

That night, Esty will not talk to Rebecca. She is angry and jealous because Rebecca was outside with Dovid. At night, Rebecca lies awake. She knows that Dovid was doing something against the rules, and she wonders whether she is really becoming the kind of orthodox religious girl she has been pretending to be during her stay at the Adelsteins.

In the middle of the night, Rebecca wakes and finds that Esty has gone from her bed and is in the closet, reading the forbidden book. Realizing that Esty is in love with Dovid, she tries to reassure her that nothing happened between her and Dovid. They agree to read the book for a little while and look at the drawings. They read descriptions of orgasm, masturbation, and body parts including the clitoris, but they have little idea of what it all means. Esty refuses to believe that Dovid has read it all. They close the book and hide it away again, promising to repent in the morning. During the night, Rebecca thinks about the judgment of God.

In the morning, Rebecca wakes before her cousin and steps out on the porch where she finds her uncle. She asks him whether, when a person dies, the family is supposed to have the mezuzah checked. Uncle Shimon replies that he was told by his rebbe (rabbi) that sometimes bad things just happen; people do not always know why Hashem (God) acts as he does.

Rebecca keeps the Shabbos all day, doing no work, not even turning on a light or sewing. She is not allowed to call her mother. Esty spends most of the day alone and prays a lot and studies the Torah (the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses).

Aunt Malka tells Rebecca that her mother sounds better and that Rebecca will be going home soon. She tells Rebecca about mikveh, a spiritually cleansing ritual bath. According to Aunt Malka, the mikveh is especially important after a woman gives birth, even if the baby dies. She says it is a commandment for adult females to perform this bath every month unless a woman is pregnant for it is a ritual purification after menstruation and childbirth. Aunt Malka instructs Rebecca to tell her mother how important the mikveh is. Rebecca goes off alone and lies in the grass. She wants to know what God wants her to do, and she wants to do it.

At night, the family gathers for Havdalah, the blessings recited at the conclusion of Shabbos, separating the holy day from the other days of the week. They stand in a circle outside and sing to God, smell spices, and drink wine. Finally they sing about Eliyahu Hanavi (known to Christians as Elijah), the prophet who will arrive someday and bring the Messiah.

Rebecca calls her mother. Her father answers the phone and tells her that she can probably come home in a couple of weeks. Rebecca mentions Aunt Malka's instruction about the ritual bath. There is silence at the end of the line for a moment, before Rebecca's father asks to speak to her aunt. Although Aunt Malka is close by, Rebecca has an uneasy feeling about what might ensue, and she says her aunt has gone out for milk. Her father requests that Aunt Malka call him.

That evening, Esty leaves the dinner table without touching her food and goes to her room, where Rebecca finds her reading the erotic book. Esty tells her to explain to her mother that she has a headache and is laying down.

After dinner, as Rebecca washes the dishes, she is angry and worried about her cousin, and she also feels fear and guilt for not doing what God wants her to do. Seeing Esty leave the house and run down the yard and into the road, Rebecca runs after her. Esty has an envelope in her hand. She tells Rebecca that she has written a note to Dovid, telling him that if he wants his book back, he must meet her at the Perelmans' house the following night. Rebecca tells Esty that is forbidden, but Esty will not listen. She tells Rebecca to go back to the house and pretend Esty is in bed. Back in her bedroom, Rebecca tries to pray. After a while Esty returns, having delivered the letter.

The following day the entire family goes blueberry-picking. Esty is in a good mood and acts as if nothing unusual has happened between her and Rebecca. At home that night, Rebecca's father Alan calls Aunt Malka, who talks to him in private. When she returns, she looks as if she has had an argument or been reproached by Alan over the matter of the ritual bath. But she insists to the girls that people have to do what is right, even when others are doing otherwise. Esty takes this as a sign that she is right in her actions regarding Dovid.

At twelve-thirty that night, Esty takes the book and is about to slip out of the quiet house when Rebecca insists on going with her. Esty agrees on one condition, that if they are caught, Rebecca must take the blame. Rebecca agrees. They reach the Perelmans' backyard and wait for Dovid, who arrives at one o'clock and asks for his book. Esty shows him the package but does not hand it over. She tells him that looking at such pictures is a sin, that there are many rules for when people can have sex. Then she kisses him, and the book falls from her hand. Rebecca picks it up. She takes it to the lake and wades in. She takes off her clothes, wades in deeper and floats on her back. She lets the book fall into the water and drop to the bottom.

Characters

Esty Adelstein

Esty Adelstein, who is about thirteen or fourteen years old, is Rebecca's older cousin. Her name was formerly Erica, but after her mother became an Orthodox Jew, Erica's name was changed to Esther, a change that seemed to affect her personality. As Erica, she was a mischievous girl, talking back to her mother and doing naughty things such as throwing bits of paper at old ladies in the synagogue. But when her mother took her to Israel, Esther repented her former ways and became pious. She spends a lot of her time praying and studying the Torah and telling her cousin Rebecca that she and her mother should be more observant of Jewish religious rituals and customs. But ironically, it is Esty, in her willingness to read the book Essence of Persimmon: Eastern Sexual Secrets for Western Lives and in her boldness in making a nocturnal appointment with Dovid and daring to kiss him, who shows herself to be more reckless, less concerned with following the precepts of her religion than her supposedly more secular cousin Rebecca. Although she may not realize it, Esty is somewhat hypocritical in her attitudes, doing exactly what she wants while presenting a pious exterior.

Alan

Alan, Rebecca's father, does not appear directly in the story, but he speaks to his daughter and to Aunt Malka on the telephone. His conversation with Rebecca shows that he has an easy, comfortable relationship with her. But he is angry with Malka for telling Rebecca to inform her mother about the importance of the mikveh, the ritual bath. It appears that Alan has strong views about how he wishes his daughter to be raised and does not take kindly to what he regards as interference.

Dovid Frankel

Dovid Frankel, a teenage boy who attends the Shabbos dinner at the home of the Adelsteins, is tall and tanned, and both Rebecca and Esty are fascinated by him. Esty believes she is in love with him. Although Dovid comes from an Orthodox family, he shows signs of rejecting his religion. He does not believe that smudged letters in a mezuzah could be the cause of a family's house fire, and he expresses his frustration at such beliefs by going outside and kicking at the metal clothesline frame. Dovid also secretly possesses a book about eastern sexual techniques, and he deliberately touches Rebecca on the arm, even though as an Orthodox Jew he is not supposed to touch a woman who is not his mother or sister.

Lev Handelman

Lev Handelman is Mrs. Handelman's husband.

Mrs. Handelman

Mrs. Handelman is Dovid Frankel's older sister. She is eighteen years old and is pregnant.

Aunt Malka

Aunt Malka, Rebecca's aunt, was formerly Marla Vincent, a set dresser for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Then she got divorced from her husband, and she and her daughter, then called Erica, went to live in Israel for a year. In Jerusalem, she met Shimon and became an Orthodox rather than secular Jew. She married Shimon and returned to the United States, changing her name from Marla to Malka. She credits her new religion with helping her to recover from her divorce. Aunt Malka now raises her large family (Shimon had five children by his former wife) according to Orthodox principles. She busies herself preparing the Shabbos dinner and organizing a family trip to pick blackberries.

Rebecca

Rebecca is a young girl of about twelve or thirteen, and is the narrator of the story. She lives in Manhattan, New York City, and her parents are secular Jews. When her mother's baby dies in infancy, Rebecca is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in upstate New York. Her relatives are Orthodox Jews, and while she stays with them Rebecca feels pressure from her cousin Esty, and from within herself, to be more observant of the Jewish religion. At home in Manhattan, Rebecca was a mischievous and adventurous girl, admitting to stealing naked-lady playing cards from a street vendor and kissing a boy from the swim team behind the bleachers. But her life changes during the summer. She and Esty spend much time praying, studying the Torah, and observing dietary laws and other Orthodox rituals and customs. These customs are quite unfamiliar to Rebecca, since in the more informal atmosphere at home she is more used to going to movies or eating a Chinese dinner. Over the summer Rebecca begins to think seriously about moral and religious questions. She wonders about the nature of God's justice, and at some moments she feels a sense of God's presence, although she is not sure what this might signify. She develops a desire to do God's will. At the end of the story she shows she has the maturity to make a moral decision of her own, as she lets the forbidden book about sexuality fall to the bottom of the lake.

Uncle Shimon

Uncle Shimon, Rebecca's uncle, is an Orthodox Jew and has lived in Israel. His first wife, with whom he had five children, died, and after meeting Malka in Jerusalem, he quickly remarried. Shimon appears to be a contented man who takes his religion seriously. He believes that each person is responsible for his relationship with God, and although his beliefs might be considered narrow, he also possesses a kind of spiritual humility. He does not believe, for example, that it is always possible to know the ways of God or why God allows certain things, even bad things, to happen.

Themes

Secular versus Religious Beliefs and Lifestyles

The story presents the tensions between two different ways of life within the Jewish communities in New York state. Rebecca, although she is Jewish, has been raised in a secular environment, without religious observance. She is not used to observing Jewish customs and rituals. The relatives with whom she stays are the opposite. They are part of a Hasidic Jewish community which rigorously observes all aspects of its faith and is suspicious of outsiders. This wariness of the world beyond the borders of their community is apparent when Dovid Frankel tells Rebecca that some of the people in the area are scared of her, believing that since she comes from worldly Manhattan, she may show her young cousins a fashion magazine—the orthodox community has a strict dress code that involves long-sleeved blouses and long skirts for women even in hot weather—or give them the wrong foods or tell them something they should not hear. It was the same, Dovid says, when the Adelsteins first moved there. Since they were newcomers, their orthodox neighbors did not trust them. The picture that emerges is of a rather closed community that distrusts outsiders and is protective of its own religious traditions and way of life. But this works the other way, too. Rebecca's father, a secular Jew, reacts negatively when he thinks that Aunt Malka has been trying to talk Rebecca into adopting orthodox practices. It appears there is a gap between Orthodox and secular Jewish worlds that is hard to bridge.

Rebecca in a sense is that bridge. The longer she stays at the Adelsteins, the more she is influenced by her religious environment. Esty nags her about the virtues of observing of Orthodox Jewish customs, and she joins with her cousin in studying the Torah and praying. At first Rebecca just goes through the motions, pretending to be pious as she knows doing so is expected of her. When she listens to Uncle Shimon explain his belief that there is a connection between a house fire and a smudged mezuzah, she expresses her thoughts about it in an open-minded way, beginning, "If there is a God who can see inside mezuzahs." The key word is "if." Her tone suggests she neither believes the idea nor disbelieves it, and she is also sufficiently free of the constraints of religious faith to admit to Dovid that sometimes she hopes that God does not exist.

However, Uncle Shimon's words do set her wondering, late at night, about weighty concepts such as the judgment of God. In this way, gradually, Rebecca begins to develop genuine religious feelings, although she does not believe that she fully understands them or their implications: "I know I've felt a kind of holy swelling in my chest, a connection to something larger than myself. I wonder if this is proof of something, if this is God marking me somehow."

Topics For Further Study

• Based on the story, do you have a negative or a positive impression of the type of Judaism it presents? Is the author, who is herself Jewish, supportive or critical of Judaism and the way it is interpreted by the Hasids? Write a short essay in which you respond to these questions, citing passages or incidents in the story to support your argument.
• Consider Aunt Malka's statement to Rebecca, "You have to do what you think is right … even when the people around you are doing otherwise." How do Rebecca and Esty interpret her words? When private morality conflicts with the dictates of religion, which voice should one follow? Write an essay discussing this issue, giving examples of situations in which this conflict might occur and how one might respond in dealing with them.
• What type of sex education should be taught in public schools? Should abstinence be emphasized or should the emphasis be on teaching students to make responsible decisions? Should students be informed about homosexuality? At what age? Should teens be allowed to obtain birth control pills from family planning clinics and doctors without permission from a parent? Prepare a class presentation in which you discuss these issues.
• Write a short story in which the main character experiences his or her first crush or first love and behaves in a reckless way in response to it. Try to capture the way it feels to have these feelings, and also indicate ways in which the person is changed by his or her experience. What does the character learn through falling in love?

Rebecca's developing religious awareness is a personal one, based more on her own thoughts, feelings, and experiences than on the teachings of an external authority. Her most powerful experience of God comes when she is alone in nature, and she senses that it is God who is the controlling force behind all natural phenomena—the scent of clover, the bees that fly past her ears, the sun that burns her skin. It is then that she decides for herself that she wants to know more about the will of God, and she wants to follow that will in her own life. She wants to do what God wants her to do.

There is irony in this theme of emerging spirituality. Rebecca, who was feared because she might bring a secular influence into the Orthodox world, is the one who quietly becomes religious, whereas Esty, who likes to give the impression of being very pious, is in fact the one who breaks religious rules. Esty is glib. She regards it as quite all right to sin, if one repents the next day. She is the one who suggests taking the forbidden book home, not Rebecca. Rebecca has a conscience about it. When Esty says no one will know the book is there, Rebecca replies, "But we'll know," as if that should be enough to deter them. Esty assures Rebecca that they will not look at the book, but she is the first one who does. It is also Esty who follows her desires and arranges a nocturnal encounter with Dovid that would horrify and alarm her parents if they were to find out. It is ironic that the girl who most insists on following a religious code of conduct is the one who breaks it most flagrantly.

Emerging Sexuality

The theme of the girls' emerging awareness of sexuality is linked to moral and religious considerations. It is clear from the start that the girls are at an age where they are curious about boys and about sex, although their knowledge of both is slight. They are both drawn to the tall, tanned Dovid Frankel and are fascinated by the book Essence of Persimmon, even though their lack of physical maturity ensures that they do not understand much of what it describes. A book about sex is bound up in Esty's mind with sin. She says the book is "tiuv, abomination," although this does not stop her from reading it. Rebecca is as intrigued as Esty by the book, but not as shocked by it. It appears that she has not been taught to regard such matters as sinful. Earlier that year, before she went to stay with her relatives, she kissed a boy behind the bleachers and appeared not to experience feelings of guilt. However, her summer at the Adelsteins has changed her in some way. Her feelings after Dovid touches her arm are more complex. As she reflects on it later, she feels a "strange rolling feeling in [her] stomach." This feeling arises in part because she is becoming aware for the first time of what it feels like to have a boy touch her bare arm, but also because she knows that Dovid is doing something against the rules of his religion. Sexual morality and religion are becoming linked in her mind.

In the end, while Esty, without showing any signs of a moral struggle, reads the book and kisses Dovid, Rebecca shows a practical moral wisdom of her own. In letting the forbidden book sink to the bottom of the lake, she is acting according to her developing moral sense and also perhaps according to a feeling that the book has the potential at this stage of her life to cause more trouble than it is worth. Her action in letting the book go is not the result of a decision she has pondered with much thought, however; it seems to happen spontaneously as she plunges into the water.

Style

Point of View and Tense

The story is told in the first person by Rebecca. This angle means that all the characters are viewed through Rebecca's eyes and through her thoughts and feelings. There is no independent, objective narrator who could explain, for example, what Esty, or Aunt Malka is thinking. They are revealed only through their words and actions and how Rebecca perceives them. An example of how this focus works occurs when Rebecca asks Esty to explain why she is looking at the forbidden book. Esty "glances down and her eyes widen, as if she's surprised to find she's been holding the book all this time." The reader is not told for certain that Esty is surprised; the qualifying phrase "as if" is necessary to maintain the established point of view, which is that of Rebecca. The point of view helps to put the emphasis on the theme of Rebecca's growth toward a deeper spiritual awareness.

The other noticeable element in the construction of the story is that it is told in the present tense, which means that the action is going on as the narrator speaks rather than having happened in the past which the narrator now is recalling. Present-tense narration is unusual, since much fiction is told in the past tense, although present-tense narration is a technique Orringer uses in a number of her stories. Writers sometimes believe that using the present tense gives a story an immediacy that it might otherwise not have, although what it may gain in immediacy is offset by a lack of perspective. The narrator of a present-tense narrative has no opportunity to look back on the events he or she is describing and assess their significance.

Setting

The story is set at the time of the Jewish celebration of Shabbos (sometimes written as Shabbat). This timing helps to ground the story in the Jewish faith and provide much of the context in which Rebecca's engagement with her religion takes place. In Jewish tradition, Shabbos, the day on which no work is done, is a reminder of the fact that God rested on the seventh day of creation. It is also a celebration of how God delivered the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Shabbos begins at sunset on Friday and continues until sunset on Saturday. It is marked with a special dinner on Friday night at which people greet one another with the words "good Shabbos." As in the story, Shabbos dinner often incorporates rituals such as candle-lighting and the singing of traditional songs such as "Shalom Aleichem," which means "Peace Be with You" and is a way of giving a blessing. Aunt Malka's baking of challah is also a Shabbos tradition. Challah is braided egg bread which symbolizes the manna, the food God provided the Israelites during their years of wandering in the desert. Traditionally, food served at Shabbos includes, as in the story, gefilte fish (a ball or cake of chopped up fish) and kugel (baked pudding made of potatoes or noodles), and also chicken soup.

Historical Context

Hasidic Judaism

In the story, the Adelsteins appear to be Hasidic Jews. The Hebrew word "hasid" (or "chasid") means "pious." Hasidism is a subdivision of Orthodox Judaism and was founded by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as Bal Shem Tov (1700–60) in Ukraine. The epithet Bal Shem Tov means "master of the good name." Rabbi Israel wrote no books but promoted the ideal of simple piety by the use of parables and stories told to the uneducated masses. He believed that sincere devotion to God was preferable to scholarly knowledge of the Talmud (the authoritative body of Jewish teachings on civil and religious law, dating from in the early centuries of the Christian era).

Hasidism quickly spread throughout Eastern Europe, and its leaders developed the doctrine of the zaddik (the Righteous One), who was believed to be the intermediary between God and man. Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810), mentioned as an authority by Uncle Shimon in the story, was the great-grandson of Israel Bal Shem Tov, and was a revered but controversial zaddik. He is remembered in the early 2000s for his allegorical folk tales about princes and princesses, beggars and kings, demons and saints, which reveal spiritual truths. Rebbe Nachman saw himself as a messianic figure who would redeem the Jewish people. Some of his followers revered him so much that on his death they refused to acknowledge any successor. This branch of Hasidism is still in existence as of 2005 and is known as the Bratslav Hasidim.

In "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," the Adelstein family appears to belong to the branch of Hasidism known as the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. There are strong Lubavitcher communities in Brooklyn, New York (numbering at least fifteen thousand people), and in upstate New York towns such as Kiryas Joel and New Square.

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement was founded in Russia by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812) in the mid-eighteenth century. His son established the sect in Lubavitch, a small town in what subsequently became the independent state of Belarus. In Russian, the word Lubavitch means "city of brotherly love." The word "chabad" is a Hebrew acronym for the three faculties of chachmah (wisdom), binah (knowledge), and da'at (understanding).

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement rapidly spread throughout Russia and the wider Jewish world, becoming especially strong, in modern times, in Israel and the United States. The movement was led by a succession of leaders known as rebbes, each descended from the previous leader. The sixth rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, was living in Poland when World War II broke out. He escaped the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1940. His son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, arrived in New York from Paris the following year, and on the death of his father-in-law in 1950, became the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe. It is this rebbe whose photograph hangs on the wall of Esty and Rebecca's bedroom in the story. Rebecca notices his "long steely beard and his eyes like flecks of black glass." She notices the photograph again when she is about to accompany Esty to meet Dovid ("The dread eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall"). Between the death of Rabbi Schneerson in 1994 and 2005, no other rebbe had been appointed.

The Hasidim are distinctive in their dress. Men wear black coats, white shirts, a black hat, and a long beard with peyos (sidecurls). Sometimes the peyos are worn in front of the ear, or they can be tucked back behind the ear. In the story, Dovid Frankel has prominent peyos, "luxuriously curled, shoulder-length." Hasidic women, like Esty and Rebecca in "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," dress modestly, wearing long skirts with long-sleeved shirts. In some Hasidic groups, married women sometimes shave their heads, and many wear wigs.

Relations between Hasidic men and women are more formal than in mainstream American culture. Hasidic men and women do not shake hands or touch each other in any other way unless they are married, and then only in private.

Critical Overview

Orringer's collection of stories, How to Breathe Underwater, was well received by reviewers. Few singled out "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones" for special attention, although the comment of the reviewer for Publishers Weekly might well apply to Rebecca in that story: "Trapped in awkward, painful situations, the young protagonists of Orringer's debut collection discover surprising reserves of wisdom in themselves."

Similarly, Lisa Dierbeck's general comment about the collection, in the New York Times Book Review, applies to "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones": "children and adults operate in a secret world of their own. They seem to exist in an underground, beyond the scope of adults' radar." This is certainly true of Rebecca and Esty; their parents have no suspicion of their secret reading of the forbidden book or their nocturnal excursion to meet Dovid.

Dierbeck also points out that "The shadow of mortality hovers over Orringer's book. More than one mother in the collection has battled cancer." Rebecca's mother, of course, has lost her infant son, and this has had an impact on Rebecca as well as her mother.

Dierbeck concludes with ringing praise of Orringer's skill as a writer: "The harsh landscape in which Orringer's characters dwell corresponds to the fierce beauty of her writing. Even the grimmest of these stories conveys, along with anguish, a child's spark of mystery and wonder."

This praise is echoed by other reviewers. In England's The Guardian, Emily Perkins offers the opinion that "Orringer allows her girls both self-doubt and great spirit; she gives them generous hearts, word-perfect dialogue and a fictional context that insists on harsh truths but is never bleak." In People Weekly, Ting Yu comments that Orringer's stories "uncover the dark, electric world of young girls on the cusp of womanhood." She adds that "Growing up is hard to do, but under Orringer's masterful care, these young girls—imperfect, broken and searching—find ways to thrive."

Criticism

Bryan Aubrey

Bryan Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on literature. In this essay, he discusses the contrast between Esty and Rebecca and Rebecca's growing spiritual awareness.

In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Orringer said of her stories: "They tend to be about young women who are in between childhood and adulthood. They are about people who are at a moment of an incredibly difficult transition in their lives." This statement certainly applies to Rebecca in "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," a story which captures with great immediacy and perceptiveness the world of adolescence in all its turmoil and uncertainty. In one summer away from home, new experiences, new ideas, and new feelings crowd in on the growing girl, and she must quickly develop ways of understanding and integrating them into her awareness of what life is and how she is going to approach it. The other young characters in the story, Esty Adelstein and Dovid Frankel, are also going through similar transitions.

The themes of the story are revealed through the relationship between Rebecca and Esty. Esty is older than Rebecca by a year or so, and initially it is she who appears to take the lead in their relationship. It is Esty who wades first into the lake, unconcerned that her parents do not allow the girls to swim. Esty has a ready-made excuse; if they are challenged on why their clothes are wet, they will tell her parents that they fell in. Deviousness seems to come naturally to Esty; behind her pious exterior she does whatever she wants to do, regardless of whether it breaks the rules. Although the reader only sees Esty through Rebecca's eyes and therefore does not have the same insight into her motivations, Esty does not seem to be conscious of the dichotomy between what she professes and what she actually does. She may have studied her religion with zeal, but she has not yet absorbed in a sincere and mature way the implications it may have for her conduct. It is Esty, for example, who suggests taking the book Essence of Persimmon home with them, and it is Esty, despite her assurance to Rebecca that they will not look at it, who is the first to take the book down from the top shelf in the closet and begin reading it.

Esty, however, does have an excuse. She is suffering from that most overwhelming of experiences, first love, a shattering event that has not yet, it appears, happened for Rebecca. It is because Esty is upset with Rebecca over Dovid Frankel that she heads for the closet and reads the forbidden book. Rebecca's sin was to go outside and spend a few moments alone with Dovid, an experience for which Esty apparently longs. Her subsequent jealousy may explain some of her spiteful and manipulative behavior toward Rebecca.

Esty's deviousness does not come so naturally to Rebecca, who is in the process of slowly assimilating what Esty, for all her piety, seems to have missed. Rebecca has been raised in a secular household but in the highly religious environment in which she now finds herself, she gradually develops a quiet awareness of God and some insight into the demands of a life lived in accordance with God's will. Unlike Esty, Rebecca shows no signs of adopting an excessively pious exterior, but she does indicate that she is developing an ability to listen to her religious feelings and let them guide her in honest but unostentatious way.

Rebecca's religious feelings come from many sources. Sometimes at Shabbos she feels the presence of something larger than herself, and she is also quite affected by Uncle Shimon's story about the flaw in the mezuzah that was responsible—so Uncle Shimon believes—for a house fire. His making this connection sets her thinking about the judgment of God, and the image she forms in her mind of God and religion seems to be a stern one, suggested by the forbidding face of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose piercing eyes stare down at her from the portrait on the bedroom wall. Rebecca even convinces herself that the death of her infant brother is God's punishment of her because she once, for a moment, wished that the baby would die. (Her wish sprang from her awareness that if the baby survived he would need constant care, and she feared as a result she might be neglected by her parents.) Religion as it comes to her in its official form is full of prohibitions, a long list of things one is supposed not to do, especially on Shabbos. There is an especially long list pertaining to when it is and is not permissible to have sex, as Esty informs her with all the confidence of one who knows: "You can't do it outside. You can't do it drunk. You can't do it during the day or with the lights on. You're supposed to think about subjects of Torah while you do it."

One of her most powerful religious experiences, however, is not mediated, at least not directly, by anything she has read or heard about God and religion. It comes directly from nature and has the stamp of personal experience, not just something someone has told her about what Judaism teaches. It comes when she is alone outside, as Shabbos nears its end. As she lies in the tall grass, experiencing nature through all her senses, she feels a presence gathering around her which culminates in a tremendous moment of new spiritual awareness:

It is God who makes the shadows dissolve around me. He sharpens the scent of clover. He pushes the bees past my ears, directs the sun onto my back until my skin burns through the cotton of my Shabbos dress. I want to know what He wants and do what He wants, and I let my mind fall blank, waiting to be told.

By letting her mind "fall blank" Rebecca shows that she is ready to learn a more mature understanding of how to discern the will of God. She waits, passively, for God to make his will known to her rather than thinking that all she must do is slavishly follow an external code of law. By making her own individual mind blank, she allows a space for God to step in. The God that speaks directly to the mind and heart in quiet moments is quite different from the deity who harshly judges those who make one small mistake.

However, in spite of this moment of revelation, Rebecca is not yet able to free herself of the shadow of guilt and judgment, since later that night she reproaches herself, and everyone else, for not being more mindful of the demands of God as they go about their day-to-day lives.

Toward the end of the story, Rebecca's emerging religious awareness bears fruit. As Esty prepares for her reckless encounter with Dovid at night, the relationship between the cousins has been quietly reversed from what it was at the beginning. Now Rebecca, the younger of the two, is the one for whom the dictates of religion influence her attitude and conduct. Rebecca also feels a sense of responsibility to protect her cousin, even though, being so young, she is not sure what she is protecting her from.

Esty in this situation certainly needs some help. She is so much in the grip of her infatuation with Dovid that she will do whatever she feels she must in order to get what she wants. By insisting that if she and Rebecca are caught, Rebecca must take all the blame, she shows her immaturity, her failure to accept that she is responsible for her own actions. It must be said also that Rebecca is not above using unscrupulous tactics of her own, as when Esty is writing a note to Dovid, and Rebecca says she will scream for Esty's mother unless Esty tells her what she is doing.

When Esty does meet up with Dovid, she is quite brazen in her attempt to manipulate him. Faced with this aggressive and cunning girl, the previously self-assured Dovid, the same boy who confidently touched Rebecca's arm the previous evening, does not have a clue how to behave. "What do you want me to do?" he says feebly. "What am I supposed to do?" As Esty reaches up to him and kisses him, Rebecca goes about some action of her own. On their way to meet Dovid, she has been acutely aware of the moral and religious implications of what they are about to do; even the natural environment reminds her of it: "Tree frogs call in the dark, the rubber-band twang of their throats sounding to me like God, God, God." Rebecca seems to have a quiet awareness that the book Essence of Persimmon has brought them nothing but quarrels and danger. They are too young, not ready for such a book, and she knows it. As she wades into the water and floats on her back, gazing up at the Milky Way, the water acts like a mikvah for her—the ritual bath of purification that Aunt Malka explained to her; it is spiritually cleansing, and she has no difficulty in letting go of the fascinating but forbidden book. She has chosen the sensible, moral choice, but done it quietly, with no great fanfare of piety.

What Do I Read Next?

• Renowned Canadian writer Alice Munro is one of Orringer's favorite writers. Orringer singled out Munro's short story collection, The Love of a Good Woman (1999) for particular praise, admiring the stories "The Children Stay," "Before the Change," and "My Mother's Dream," as well as the title story. Orringer admires the way Munro describes the inner lives of her characters.
• In an interview available on the Barnes and Noble website, Orringer named George Saunders's Pastoralia (2001) as one of her favorite books. It is Saunders's second collection, consisting of five stories as well as the title novella. Saunders sets his stories in a disturbing near future in which capitalism and the free market rule the world, resulting in grotesque inequities. The stories feature many wretched characters in appallingly bad situations, but there are many moments of grace and humor, and in spite of the squalor, the human spirit seems to triumph. Orringer commented that the stories always hit the right emotional notes.
• Sue Fishkoff's The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch (2003) explores how young Lubavitchers carry their message of spiritual renewal to the wider Jewish world throughout the United States. Fishkoff, who admires and respects the Lubavitch movement, draws on many interviews she conducted, as well as her experiences in traveling with Lubavitchers to Shabbos dinners, mikvah demonstrations, and fundraising events.
• The Chosen (1967), by Chaim Potok, is a coming-of-age story that focuses on the friendship between two Jewish boys in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s. Reuven is from an Orthodox Jewish family. Danny is a member of a Hasidic sect, and his father is a respected rebbe and zaddik. The unlikely friendship between the boys grows against a background of World War II, Zionism, and the founding of the state of Israel.
• In Alice McDermott's Child of My Heart (2002), Theresa, a middle-aged woman, looks back on a summer spent working among the rich residents of East Hampton, on Long Island, New York, in the 1960s, when she was fifteen. Theresa also has to look after her visiting eight-year-old cousin. Together they weave a fantasy world, which for Theresa includes emerging sexual awareness.

And yet, even while Rebecca takes a mature action of which her religious, conservative relatives would approve, there is another element in this scene that suggests Rebecca is also cultivating an independent spirit and is not bound solely by the prescriptions of her religion. At the beginning of the story she pointed out that she and Esty were forbidden to swim because, they were told, it was immodest to show their bodies. Instead, they had waded fully clothed into the lake. But this time Rebecca does not hesitate to remove her shirt and skirt, and she notes how she feels the night air against her bare skin. Equivalent of a mikvah this may be, but it is one that is closely connected to the natural world in all its sensuality. The nearly naked young girl who floats serenely on the water at night is a very different person from the one who returned home with the Shabbos groceries only a few days earlier. Quietly doing what she feels is the right thing (as Aunt Malka told Esty that she must), she also shows she is growing in independence, calmly ignoring a rule for which she sees no justification.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Julie Orringer with Robert Birnbaum

In the following interview, Orringer discusses with Robert Birnbaum her childhood, her ties to the South, and the short story.

Julie Orringer, with her nine excellent stories in How to Breathe Underwater, can be added to the list of young writers who are sustaining the viability of short form fiction. The conversation below will tell you something about her thoughts on writing and her stories and some things about her life that may illuminate her less obvious thoughts and ideas. What you won't learn is that Orringer went to Cornell as an undergraduate and then to the Writers Workshop in Iowa City followed by a Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. Her stories have been published in the Barcelona Review, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope.

Orringer lives in San Francisco with her husband writer Ryan Harry and she is, of course, working on her first novel.

[Robert Birnbaum]: If someone were an orthodox and literal person they might look at your book and say, 'Where is that story 'How to Breathe Under Water'?' Usually the title of the collection is also a story in the book. Why does the title represent these stories?

[Julie Oringer]: The title came to me rather late in the process. I didn't know when I was putting the stories together that this was going to be the thematic umbrella. And I was working on that story ['Isabel Fish'] and I came to that moment when the narrator is trying to imagine what's ahead as she begins scuba lessons. She is coming off a rather awful incident with a car accident and a drowning and it seemed to me this phrase, this idea of trying to breathe under water was something that maybe had some larger resonance for the other stories as well. They tend to be about young women who are in between childhood and adulthood. They are about people who are at a moment of an incredibly difficult transition in their lives. It's not just a coming-of-age transition—in fact, I am resistant to that idea of coming of age. It suggests two different states—one that you pass out of and one that you strictly enter. I feel like the title has something to do with how hard it is to redefine yourself after a loss or trauma or as you are entering this new period of your life. And yet we somehow do it anyway.

Was that an unconscious theme? Or just what you cared about when you were writing these stories?

I think so. It's something I didn't really know that I cared about when I was younger, as I was growing up, until I had the distance from those experiences that was necessary to actually be able to write about them.

How was your childhood?

[laughs] How is anybody's childhood?

[both laugh] That's a fair response but I'm the one asking the questions here.

[laughs] That's fair, too. My childhood was great in most respects and awful in certain respects. I was very lucky. I was lucky to be born in this country, at the time that I was born, into the family that I was born into, with loving parents and a brother and sister that I was close to. But my family moved a lot because my parents were [both] physicians and they were early on in their training when I was born. In fact, they were in their third year of medical school when I was born. And that made it hard for me in certain ways—as an elementary school kid because I was the new kid and it took me a long time to dig in. That was hard enough to begin with and I was this awkward, gangly, bookish kid who would rather sit in the library and read chapters in books than trade stickers on the playground. I think things were made a lot more difficult by the fact that my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 10. And so from very early on I had to begin contemplating the idea that I would lose her and experiencing the uncertainty that that threw into our lives … she was sick for 10 years before she died.

[pause] I ssuppose it's natural to look for biographical clues in stories. Other than a couple of stories that take place in the South I don't see any clues of a connection to the South for you. How is it that one of your stories ended up in New Stories from the South?

I actually did spend seven years living in the South when I was growing up. I lived in New Orleans, between the ages of five and 12. It was a time when I was developing a sense of what I liked to read. When I was in elementary school—because I went to a really wonderful school, I spent a lot of time learning about the architecture of New Orleans and its history and I felt pretty at home in that place despite the problems I was having in school.

Isn't New Orleans atypical of the rest of the South, a thing unto itself?

Yes, it's probably atypical of the rest of anything in the world. New Orleans people are atypical of the South and we were atypical of most residents because we were a young Jewish family. We didn't have any old ties there. We came there because of my father's work. That was part of the strangeness of it for me. What did it mean to be a Jewish kid growing up in this place in which the biggest festival of the year was Mardi Gras—an essentially Christian festival? So I think that was an element that contributed to my sense of being somewhat on the outside of things.

Why did Shannon Ravenel consider you a Southern writer?

[laughs] Because that particular story took place in New Orleans and she knew that I had lived there as a child.

That was very ecumenical of her. I look at your pedigree on the dust jacket of your book and the pedigree is not at all unusual: Iowa, Stanford. If I said to you as a publisher, 'I think you are a really incredible talent Julie, I would publish anything that you want. But I would really like not to identify you. I would just like to present your work and other people that I publish in plain undecorated boards, numbered titles, and designate some anonymous names for the authors,' how would you feel about that?

How would I feel about losing the—

The personal identification with your work—

I think that would be fine.

And thereby lose an opportunity to be celebrated and acknowledged?

The work would be presented without any connection to me, the writer, at all?

Right.

I'd think that would be fine. I didn't write the stories in order to be celebrated or even to be a writer, as it were. I wrote the stories because I wanted—I had these things that I wanted to say. That I wanted to get out there for other people to understand and maybe feel some connection with. So everything else that goes along with it in terms of receiving recognition is really not even secondary—it's tertiary or something further on down the line. It's a very distant corollary to what's really important, which is that these stories are now making themselves out into the world and maybe there is a chance that someone will meet them with understanding and with common feeling.

And then what happens, what are your expectations?

After that I would like to crawl back into my hole and write my novel. [laughs] One of the things that I resist in fiction is the idea that a terrible experience will lead to some kind of epiphany or positive change in a character.

What happens to the reader after they have made a connection with your stories? What should they be getting that would be satisfying to you—a better understanding of the world and perhaps making the world better?

It's really hard to boil it down to one thing that I would like for them to be getting out of it. One thing that I would want [is for] them to look at these characters. This is what experience can be like for women between the ages of nine and 27. Or this is how difficult it is for other people and I don't have to feel I am alone in experiencing this profound difficulty. Or maybe something like, 'Everything doesn't have to come up roses or seem as if it is a making me heroic when it is really awful.' One of the things that I resist in fiction is the idea that a terrible experience will lead to some kind of epiphany or positive change in a character.

There is the notion that there is some nobility in suffering …

Yes, when some of these stories are about the most difficult things that could happen to you—being a young kid and losing your mother, for example. I don't feel ultimately strengthened by that experience. I feel like I have experienced this incredible loss. I don't want anyone to have to go through that. It doesn't mean that it won't make you think in more interesting or complicated ways about life and death but people go through hideous things in the world and to suggest that those things somehow make you a better person—

Or that they recover—

Or that they recover or that they somehow are necessary, that would be a mistake.

Tell me what it feels like to write and what it feels like when it is going well and when it is not. Your description in 'Isabel Fish' of the young girl as she recalls the actual car crash, sinking in the pond, was incredibly vivid. Or the druggie aunt in 'Care' who is taking care of her six-year-old niece and her own struggle with the decision to take the drugs she has in her pocket. And the sixth-grader who is being taunted and teased relentlessly—these were very clearly powerfully expressed. So can we focus your descriptive skills on what it is, when you are writing, that you are feeling?

In the stories that you mentioned those were moments when I had really gotten inside this character's head and I was really feeling what it meant to be her. And those are moments that come quite a ways into the story and they had taken a good deal of warming up and a good many drafts in order to get to that point where I could write inside the person that way.

Is it like taking drugs, that the first high leaves you forever trying to recreate that first feeling or buzz? Sometimes you do and sometimes …

Yeah. There are certainly times when there is no buzz at all, where there is nothing at all. I just feel like I am clacking out the words on a keyboard and they are just dead on the page. There are other times when I feel I have entered this fugue state where everything seems to drop away and I am almost channeling the story through the character. I don't want to sound New Agey or mystical about that but it does feel like it is something that is not entirely under my control and that is an exhilarating feeling. It is exciting.

Exciting? As being on a merry-go-round? Or a roller coaster? Or exciting as a watching something totally new?

In the sense of something totally new. If I am creating those characters and the characters have begun to attain some kind of reality—then it becomes all the more unpredictable. I have no idea what's going to happen next. Unlike a roller coaster, which picks you up and drops you down and rattles you around a little bit, this character could do an infinite number of things. I have no way of knowing what those things may be. If I understand the character then I know that at least those things are within a scope of which this person is. Or what I am trying to drive towards or work towards in subsequent drafts. Some writers are being castigated for taking big chances in their work. That's highly objectionable. Writers should be encouraged to take chances.

Is writing stories a warm up for writing the grander thing, the novel?

When I started out writing short stories I imagined that this was a kind of practice for a novel that was going to come later. As I got farther along in my studies and in the development of my writing I became so excited about the short story as a form I ceased thinking of it as anything I wanted to do as preparation. So many of the short story writers that I profoundly admire like Alice Munro or Charles Baxter or Richard Ford—I could go on and on—I saw them making something of this form that felt entirely new to me. And that was extremely engaging in itself and something that I felt I wanted to devote a long time to. I thought I might never write a novel and I didn't have a problem with that. I was happy to think that I would always work in the short story form. And the fact that I am working on a novel right now comes more out of the fact that there came along a story that I really wanted to tell that seems like it was to be too large for the scope of the short story. And so that was also a pleasure too. Now I am getting into this different form that provide its own challenges. I hope that I don't have to write as many novels as I have written short stories before I come up with one that is not terrible.

I am tempted to ask you to self-critique yourself—but I won't. Charles Baxter said something quite acute about you in the dust jacket blurb, talking about 'a headlong narrative energy.' That's exactly what I felt in your writing. But now I have forgotten what I wanted to ask.

You were going to ask me to criticize myself.

No, I don't want to do that, unless you want to. Do you know the Randy Newman song, 'God's Song'?

I don't know it.

God explains why he loves human beings even though they show foolish judgment in believing in him when he does all these bad things to man … I was listening to that song as I was driving into Boston today and I thought about how in three minutes and 12 seconds, Newman has encapsulated a big story so perfectly in a truly short form. I got to thinking about whether people thought about songs as stories and narratives. But I digress … who is reading short stories?

More and more people are reading short stories.

Are those people co-equivalent with those who are learning how to write them?

In some cases yes. But people have always read short stories in magazines. In recent years there have been some short story collections that have emerged as real favorites among readers. Like Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Adam Haslett's Stranger Here …

Richard Ford's Multitude of Sins, ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere …

Yeah. I was speaking to my dad about this recently. My father is a cardiologist and he doesn't have a lot of time for reading. But he loves reading short stories because he can sit down and pick up the book and be in somebody's world for 20 minutes or an hour and follow the course of a narrative to it's completion. Or at least in the sense that short stories can be said to finish.

Sure, that was the reason magazines published short fiction—it was quick and easy—readers could take fiction in small doses. Mark Winegardner takes the position that a writer's most serious work is short form—if you really want to know a writer look at their short stories. He suggested that novels can be sloppy and allow for mistakes but writers aren't allowed to make mistakes in short fiction.

There is no room for them in the short story. And also the short story is a much more revisable form. It's awfully hard and it takes a very long time to revise a novel. It takes a long time to revise short stories certainly but it's easier to put a short story through nine or 10 drafts than to do the same thing with a novel. Maybe there is an expectation that the short story has been more carefully examined, more times, by the time it hits the page. [Tobias Wolff] finished reading and a neurosurgeon approached him and said, 'Boy I really loved the reading. I've been thinking that I'd love to do some writing.' And Toby said, 'That's funny, I was thinking I'd like to do some brain surgery.'

So as not to make the digression totally irrelevant, do you listen to music and perhaps with the thought of hearing stories?

Sometimes I really love and retain songs that are very narrative and then other times the songs I love are for their sonic quality.

'Louie Louie'?

[laughs] The song that I was thinking about was that great Tom Waits song 'Step Right Up' where he is compiling a variety of ad slogans, jingles, and tag-lines into this hilarious song. Selling everything from gardening services to sexual favors to new shirts to what have you. I like it when musicians are taking chances and I am pretty catholic in my musical tastes. I love jazz—Charles Mingus …

Did you ever hear Chuck D do a Mingus composition called 'Gun Slinging Bird?' It was on a Mingus compilation disc by Hal Wilner called Weird Nightmare. It's a two-minute song about a fire in a nightclub and how he (Mingus) escapes by breaking out through a wall—like he had seen a man do who was being chased by a woman he had threatened with a knife. Talk about a compact story—you've never heard it?

I'll have to check it out. I love songs that will suggest stories. I find that Nina Simone's songs are very suggestive and Cole Porter also tends to be suggestive in that way. And I tend to like fairly narrative poetry for obvious reasons. Though it's out of fashion. I am not ashamed to like it.

You're not ashamed?

No.

You have cast yourself as an odd person. Not that you are stereotypical but there is a kind of person who when there was recess in elementary school is the person who was not playing kickball but is sitting off to the side on the playground, reading a book.

I played kickball.

[laughs]

I would get my keister kicked instead of the ball. I did love to play outside and do all the normal things too. I was bi-polar in that sense. Maybe as a child … what I didn't like was the way a lot of the kids in private school that I went to in New Orleans were overly concerned with the outward trappings of wealth. It's amazing to think that in second grade everybody knows what kind of car everybody else's parent's drove, what job everybody's parents had. Even the addresses, they knew what area of town you lived in.

I ran into my son's pediatrician on the subway once. I love this guy—he's an excellent doctor but it says something that he is taking public transportation. Anyway, he told me how disturbing he found it that his patients—pre-teens—knew the income ranges of many professions and they have this acute sense of what things cost … sadly, that is what has been created.

It's kind of scary. For a long time, gradually, to a greater and greater extent we have been concentrating on the wrong things in our schools and in our higher education. It used to be when you went to college, we were meant to learn something about the vast array of knowledge in the world. Now what I see fairly often, particularly at Stanford, students will come in to their university education thinking, 'This is what I have to do in order to prepare myself for the job.' And sometimes student will, wonderfully, stray into other things. Many of my creative writing students have been pre-med majors or even people in the business school or engineers who have discovered there is this other thing that they really love and want to learn more about. I am glad they are doing it.

Jamaica Kincaid mentioned to me that in her teaching experience she felt as if writing students were lacking in a lot of general knowledge about the world. They just didn't know what caused a hurricane or things that one would expect people to know. It seems like you are supposed to declare your major and career path in the first grade.

I think so. If I had to declare my major in first grade I would have been a pre-med.

Were your parents both happy to have chosen medicine?

They were free choices although my father and mother were both artistically talented. My father is an incredible writer. He studied journalism before he studied medicine. He's always been extremely eloquent both on the page and in person. My mother was a violinist and a dancer and gymnast. She had to choose whether to pursue her gymnastic training under the Olympic coach Vela Karly or go to college and to medical school. She chose medical school. Even though I saw my parents making that decision for their lives I was always conscious of the fact that there were other ways that you could go. And that my parents hadn't necessarily followed a straight path to their chosen professions. I didn't write the stories in order to be celebrated or even to be a writer, as it were. I wrote the stories because I wanted, I had these things that I wanted to say. That I wanted to get out there for other people to understand and maybe feel some connection with.

So what are you going to do in your life?

Oh. [pause] What am I going to do with my life?

Is your life defined by whether you can write or not? If tomorrow you were unable to write something satisfactory and the day after also and so on, what would happen to you?

I would keep trying for an awfully, awfully long time. But if part of the question is what else is there in my life that's of great importance to me? I'd have to say my relationship with my husband is extremely important. He is also a writer. His short story collection is called Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona. His name is Ryan Hardy.

You mention him in the acknowledgments along with everyone else in the world except for me. [laughs]

Next time, Robert. Absolutely.

[laughs]

I feel like our relationship is one of the most important things that I can devote my energy and time to. As is my relationship with my brother and sister, who are five and eight years younger respectively. Today is my brother's birthday. Every time you say September 15, I get a little excited and then I remember why.

Where is he?

He's in medical school at Ohio State University in Columbus. And my sister is teaching middle school English through Teach for America in LA. We have retained this incredible bond of closeness as we have all moved into our adult years. And so, apart from writing, those relationships are incredibly important to me. And also if I couldn't write for one reason, then I would try to see what I could do actively to make the world better—through teaching or through social action. That's one of the things that we as writers better be conscious of. I am lucky enough to live in San Francisco where Vendela Vida and Dave Eggers have 826 Valencia and it's an incredible program where kids are receiving one-on-one tutoring that they would in no way have access to. It's been a pleasure to go in and work with some of the students. It makes me feel even if my writing sucks I am doing something useful.

Here you are, whatever it has taken to get you here as a young and now published writer, now you enter the fray—for lack of a better word …

It's a good word.

… you are touring to support your book and talking to total strangers. And in front of total strangers, for a period of time, and subjecting yourself to the commentary and observations and judgments and occasionally ridicule of others. How much do you pay attention to the literary press? And what do you make of the dialectic emerging on snarking? Can you talk about that? Have you gotten any bad reviews?

I have gotten some reviews that are not as positive as I would have liked. I have been thinking about this a lot simply because it is a significant change in my writing life—not my writing life but my life as this person that writes. I've been very fortunate in the way things have worked out for me in publishing. Sometimes reviewers can react against that. Reviewers sometimes like to get behind a person who is engaged in a real struggle to get their voice heard or is being under-published. Sometimes they will react against someone who has a first book coming out from a terrific publisher. Especially someone who is young.

Currently that would include Nell Freudenberger.

She has received some wonderful reviews. I think her work is terrific. But some people have also reacted against the hype around her book and it's unfair but inevitable. That's something we have to deal with and it has nothing to do with who we are as writers and what we are doing when we sit down and work on the next thing. In a baseball game you either win or lose. It's not binary in a piece of fiction.

It has nothing to do with who you are as a writer?

Not with who we are when we are sitting down and communicating with our work on the page or with the ideas that we are trying to bring to the page. If it does then that's a problem and we have to do whatever we can to get away from that. It's inevitable that it will be on our minds. That it will affect us to a certain extent. We have to do our best to minimize that.

I suppose the most important thing in writing is the text but I can't dismiss the notion that the person counts for something in this scheme. David Thomson recently reviewed a new biography of Robert Capa and discussed the question about the famous shot he took of a dying Spanish soldier—was it staged? If it was staged does it devalue the picture, the most important thing being the image on the page? But it does matter.

It does. Can I ask you a question?

O.K..

To what extent do you think about where the review is coming from when you read the review? To what extent are you thinking, 'Well, here's what this person is saying. Here's what's maybe motivating them?'

For the few reviews I read, I suppose that I do question the negative criticism. I dislike the disrespect for the effort—which is not to say that one ought to be reverential or get a pass because of the work done.

There is a story that I love that Toby Wolff tells—an experience he had after a reading. He had finished reading and a neurosurgeon approached him and said, 'Boy I really loved the reading. I've been thinking that I'd love to do some writing.' And Toby said, 'That's funny, I was thinking I'd like to do some brain surgery.'

[laughs] Except the difference is that writing is more accessible than brain surgery.

It can be but my brother is training to be a neurosurgeon and …

He can't write?

Actually, he can write. One of the reasons that people are so drawn to writing is that they see somebody stepping up and telling their stories and people think, 'Ah, yes I have stories to tell.' Or, 'I want to tell my story.' That became something that was important to me along the way. 'Ah, it's not just something that you read in a book. You can put it down on a page yourself.'

After I got done with James Wolcott's pummeling of Jonathan Lethem's new novel in the Wall Street Journal, I did question what he was doing and I did see it as an act of bravado since Wolcott also has a book coming out. Also I thought that he might have been physically ill when he wrote the review since he was so totally unsympathetic. He started off quoting Thomas Wolfe, 'Only the dead know Brooklyn,' and then he ends the review, 'Only the dead know Lethem's Brooklyn. And they are not talking.'

That's entirely unfair.

It is clever.

Yeah, it is but cleverness will get you a review and a cup of tea.

Did you see Clive James's piece in the Op-Ed section of the NYT which seemed to cap off the snarkery debate?

I did and I thought it was an excellent synopsis of the argument. It talked about the necessity of the instructive review. And that a bad review can be a plea on the part of the reviewer to make the writer see some truth about his work or the world. That's extremely important. That's one of the things, that when I was going to embark on this process of putting the work out there, I was speaking to a friend of mine, ZZ Packer, about her experience and whether or not she read reviews. Her book was beautifully reviewed but there were a couple of reviews that she found very instructive that were not unmitigatingly positive. So she said, 'Absolutely, I read the review, I might learn something about who I am as a writer and the book.' My editor's feeling was the same. I got one review that wasn't what I hoped it would be. So after that I said, 'Boy I am not going to read another review.' But my editor reminded me, 'Sometimes a review can help your work.'

Sometimes. But the issue is not the less-than-positive review, it's the hatchet job or the ad hominem snide and vicious one. Maybe the thing is also a matter of quantity. There seem to be so many critical decapitations.

The worst review is the snarky, dismissive review. If somebody really takes fierce issue with something in a book then that can be an homage in itself. The dismissive review is the one that really disrespects the time and the effort of the writing itself and that's a horrible thing to see done to someone. It would be interesting to see a compendium of reviews and see if we could trace the history of bile in reviews. [laughs]

I was going over the few dependable literary critics and I find that they are not prone to this slash-and-burn review. Eder is not sarcastic and b―y.

No …

Caldwell can be tart but she's clearly an enthusiast. James Wood can be fierce but still he seems to be respectful. Yardley, Dirda, Daniel Mendelsohn aren't hatchet carriers.

And I think that it comes out of loving to read and loving what they are seeing on the page. Not just from the standpoint of whether this writer is doing what they are trying to do to the greatest extent they can do it but also a joy at the variance of what is out there. And at the chances that people are taking. One thing that is slightly disturbing that I have seen recently in reviews is that some writers are being castigated for taking big chances in their work. That's highly objectionable. Writers should be encouraged to take chances and if they fail it should be seen within the context of what they attempted rather than as a kind of flaw of judgment in even having tried in the first place.

That would be having a greater expectation of human nature than we have any right to. Look in Boston, we have one of the great pitchers in baseball history, Pedro Martinez. If he has a bad outing at Fenway Park he is booed. They don't say, 'Oh, a bad day. Better luck next time Pete.' No, they boo him.

In a baseball game you either win or lose. It's not binary in a piece of fiction.

Right. Though I think that in a 162-game season no one game is more important. Can we go back to the song discussion? I am fascinated with the notion of creating a list—a popular contemporary pastime—of meaningful narrative story songs. I was thinking about it a lot because of Warren Zevon's death. I spent a few days listening to a collection of his songs and I found that he was really good at pulling you into the middle of his dreams and thoughts. Sometimes with the most obvious words. Like a song called 'Life'll Kill Ya.' Or, 'Gorilla, You're a Desperado,'

    Big gorilla at the L.A. Zoo
    Snatched the glasses right off my face
    Took the keys to my BMW
    Left me here to take his place

Anyway, you mentioned that you loved Cole Porter. Can you think of some songs that you might say had the same narrative force as a good piece of fiction?

Can you give me a minute on that one? [pause] There is a Nina Simone song I believe is called 'Four Women.' She is singing about four different characters, all black women, all beautifully distinct.

Besides the narrative force of the works by themselves the reason I am dwelling on those is because the notion of hypertextuality was a big thing for a while. We saw the manufacture of these complex CD-Roms that had all these multimedia links. And I was thinking about whether anyone had created any fiction that had musical links or visual links.

A lot of that is coming out of the MFA program at Brown.

Oh yes, Robert Coover …

It's not something I have found necessary to explore in my own work. I kind of love the object of the book and reading the words on a physical page. In this physical object. I love the substance and the weight of it. But I think there is a great deal of possibility for developing new forms. It's exciting that some people are doing it.

Because when I talked with them a number of younger writers have been unabashed about their shorter attention spans and the culture they grew up in which included TV and that sampling in music has something to do with it. Perhaps the cultural watering holes include more diverse kinds of information that flow into textual narratives.

It's interesting about shortened attention spans. We hear a lot about that. It's almost a commonplace in what people will say when they are talking about the x and y generation. But if we accept the idea that attention span has necessarily been shortened then it's a kind of giving up. It's saying we are not going to try to present the kind of movies or books or songs or art to these people that would require a long attention span.

Much is produced that isn't going to try …

That's a crime. That's a mistake.

It's just like what happens with computers. They will make you bend to their limitations. I remember reading a review of some new doo-dad and the writer pointed out that because the utensil couldn't do some particular operation the user was unlikely to challenge the limitation. Anyway Franzen writes a long book and it sells well …

Jeffery Eugenides wrote a 700-page book. And some short story writers are writing longer stories. Andrea Barrett wrote an incredibly long story. Alice Munro writes very long stories.

Neal Stephenson has published a 1300-page book that is the first in a trilogy, William Vollman's new book is 3000 pages. Tobias Wolff, known for short stories, has published a novel …

I am very excited to read it. I read the part that was excerpted in the New Yorker. It seemed like some of the best work that I have seen him do.

Is your world a world whose boundaries are set by being a writer or do you have any boundaries? Do you have friends who are not writers?

Oh yes.

Interests outside of who has written what?

In fact it is awful when you go out with other writers and you realize you have done nothing for four hours but talk about writing.

[laughs]

Writing is this thing that is supposed to be a part of the larger world. It's not supposed to be about the worlds of writers.

That is a complaint that people frequently lodge against contempory fiction.

Yes. It should be about the larger world and it is extremely important to hang out with non-writers and be interested in things that have nothing to do with writing.

Source: Julie Orringer with Robert Birnbaum, "Personalities: Birnbaum v. Julie Orringer," in The Morning News, http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_julie_orringer.php, October 22, 2003.

Sources

Birnbaum, Robert, "Birnbaum v. Julie Orringer," in The Morning News, October 22, 2003. Available online at http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_julie_orringer.php.

Dierbeck, Lisa, "Survival of the Meanest," in the New York Times Book Review, October 19, 2003, p. 18.

Orringer, Julie, "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," in How to Breathe Underwater, Knopf, 2003, pp. 91-121.

Perkins, Emily, Review of How to Breathe Underwater, in the Guardian, April 3, 2004. Available online at http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1183507,00.html

Review of How to Breathe Underwater, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 250, No. 34, August 25, 2003, p. 38.

Yu, Ting, Review of How to Breathe Underwater, in People Weekly, Vol. 60, No. 15, October 13, 2003, p. 50.

Further Reading

Isaacs, Ron, Ask the Rabbi: The Who, What, When, Where, Why, & How of Being Jewish, John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

Rabbi Ron Isaacs's book is an informative guide to all matters Jewish, aimed at teenage readers. It includes answers to serious questions about the nature of God, prayer, and death, and responds to more light-hearted questions, such as why there are so many Jewish comedians and doctors. It includes sections on "classic Jewish books," including the Talmud and the Kabbalist text, the Zohar. The author is a rabbi of a New Jersey congregation and co-director of its Hebrew high school.

Levine, Stephanie Wellen, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls, New York University Press, 2004.

Stephanie Wellen Levine spent a year living as a participant observer in the Lubavitcher Hasidic community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. Her book answers the question of whether adolescent girls raised in a religious environment such as Hasidism are able to develop an individual voice of their own or whether they are restricted to conformist, submissive roles. Levine found that the girls displayed a rich individuality within the confines of a patriarchal world. The book tells the story, through interviews, of seven Lubavitch girls.

Morris, Bonnie J., Lubavitcher Women in America: Identity and Activism in the Postwar Era, State University of New York Press, 1998.

This is a study of Hasidic women in the Lubavitcher sect. The emphasis is on the contribution made by women to their community since 1950, when outreach programs supported by the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem M. Schneerson began to empower Lubavitcher women.

Review of How to Breathe Underwater, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. 71, No. 15, August 1, 2003, p. 986.

The reviewer offers cautious praise of Orringer's collection, but suggests that too many of the stories show little narrative progression and tend to peter out.