Ice Cream, by Helen Dunmore. Grove Press. 224 pages. $23.
The best short story collections, like the best CDs, the best art exhibits in small galleries, the best books of poetry, rarely vary too widely in voice, in emotional palette. The sameness you find in the great collections by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Jean Toomer and Chekhov is a blessing; a vision is presented, reinforced; variations on the vision allow you to marvel at the thoroughness, the completeness of this new imaginary world.
With too wide a range -- in locale, in type of character, in voice -- you often get the equivalent of a greatest-hits collection: The arrangement of the stories doesn't matter; themes don't coalesce; you could pick any story out of order and read it without suffering.
The British novelist Helen Dunmore's miraculous new collection, Ice Cream, proves the exception to the rule: While covering vast physical and emotional terrain in wickedly authentic -- and different -- voices, Dunmore maintains absolute control of her fictional kingdom, leaving her authorial thumbprint in the margins of the work, in the subtle way she shifts between scenes, and catches us short at the stories' climactic moments.
These are stories about expectations, large and small. In some of the slighter stories, such as "Lilac" and "Ice Cream," Dunmore builds toward abrupt epiphany: the young girl who spies on the dangerously beautiful Swedish hockey player who's seduced her cousin, the excruciatingly thin fashion model in a chic restaurant who causes a commotion by ordering ice cream for dessert.
The longer, more complex stories are even more rewarding. The "Kiwi-Fruit Arbour," a gorgeously complete tale of class envy, begins with Ulli, a young, poor Finnish girl, being driven by two rich kids, Jean-Paul and Isabelle Colbert, across the French countryside, which she's visiting as part of a cultural exchange program. "Jean-Paul never tires of mapping out landscapes for Ulli, stripping away the present moment of languid sun and ice-cream to explain a disharmony of architecture along the sea-front, and the self-willed millionaire pride which has caused it; to tell her why the hedges run wide as lanes between the apple orchards; to point out the beaches where Albertine once played Diabolo, and the little band of girls once gathered to torment and enchant Marcel Proust."
Ulli, secretly pregnant, is a ruthless observer of her ruthless hosts, and in the story's final moments she sees the gap between her life and theirs as clearly, as forlornly, as a Chekhovian physician. Falling sick at a lush chateau, Ulli hides in a public bathroom as her rich friends call from outside the door.
"This is Ulli's affair," the narrator says, "the affair of people who don't have kiwi arbours or beautiful mothers, who are silly little girls who ought to be got out of the way. This is the affair of people who are 'exceptionally gifted,' and win scholarships to study in Paris and stay in the French countryside with families who want to offer some of their brimming wealth and principle to those whom they would never otherwise meet." The rightness of Ulli's observations does little to lessen her sadness. Like many characters in this rich collection, she is strong, yet inconsolable.
Ben Neihart is the author of Hey, Joe and Burning Girl. Bloomsbury USA will publish his next book, Rough Amusements, next spring.