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A paperback original
The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart
Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes
surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their
lives from a unique perspective. In "Chestnut Season,"
a young woman stalled in traffic sees her future self parked
beside her; in "Boyfriends," the recently deceased
protagonist endures eulogies by her ex-beaus and husbands;
in "Mrs. Fargo," a young man faces a reckoning with
his first-grade teacher, a suicide, for whom he's harbored
a crush and whom he hopes to impress with his worldly successes.
The short-short "Buoyant" introduces Elise, nine
months pregnant, as she drifts down the Santa Fe River, trying
to jettison her suddenly circumscribed existence. Desperate
to impress upon his students the seriousness of life, the
professor in "Pedagogy'" boils his head, discovering
in the end a lesson learned too late.
Other stories touch upon issues of identity, following characters
who find themselves in the wrong places, or who find themselves
too late. At the advice of their marriage counselor, the couple
in "What Nina Wants" take on the personas of Charles
Mingus and Nina Simone, speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway
in a rented MG, with a loaded gun and an electric bass. In
a small town in 1970s New Jersey, the protagonist of "Embankment"
can't decide if she's on a date or has been abducted. "Do
That Everywhere" finds the teen-aged Cami on the verge
of becoming her mother—promiscuous and bitter. In "Glen
Echo," a badass womanizer wonders who he is now that
he's married an Italian-American Bridezilla.
Through compact, tightly woven prose, vivid imagery, and
a variety of arresting narrative techniques, If the Heart
Is Lean zeroes in on the humorous and painful lives of
people who are mysteries to themselves.
Margaret Luongo teaches creative writing
at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her stories have appeared
in Tin House, FENCE, Cincinnati Review, and other journals.
She lives with her husband and two cats in Hamilton, Ohio.
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