Wit wins the day

To read the novels and stories of Karen Russell, Sheila Heti, Rivka Galchen, Adelle Waldman, Alexandra Kleeman, Nell Zink, Ottessa Moshfegh and Rebecca Curtis, among others, is to notice we’re in a golden age of young female writers who, when they wish to be, are powerfully, cleansingly and sometimes bawdily funny.

In their fiction we often meet smart and yearning young women who are underemployed and underwhelmed by what politics and society have on offer. Resigned to Tinder, to emoticons, to their partners’ beards and online pornography habits, they’ve slid past quarter-life crises while munching on, perhaps, a wizened community-garden radish.

Irony and satire are only two of the tools in these writers’ kits, but they are crucial in their consistent drawing of blood. As Heti put it in her novel How Should a Person Be?, “You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.”

In her first book, the story collection The Bed Moved, Rebecca Schiff does indeed seem to know everything, by Heti’s definition. Her dark wit gives her stories genuine tensile strength, even when they misfire. She dips into her own braininess as if it were a bottomless trust fund.

‘Write What You Know,’ one of her stories is titled. It begins, “I only know about parent death and sluttiness.” “Parent Death and Sluttiness” is a terrible alternative title for this book, but it wouldn’t be an entirely inaccurate one.

In these stories, parents whisper “Sloan Kettering,” Schiff notes, the way they whispered “Harvard.” About sex in New York City, one character comments about the free condoms: “The condom wrappers had the subway map on them, in case you needed to know how to get somewhere while erect.” Most of the best lines won’t be printed here.

Schiff’s narrators are educated consumers of their own dissatisfaction. They are alert to euphemism and smugness. At a wedding in ‘Men Against Violence,’ one woman observes that the bride and groom “were in charge of what we valued tonight — ethical shrimp, token gay ministers, gift packets of seeds, nonviolent porn.”

The bride is a chaplain at a college where, the narrator suggests, violence is not what it used to be: “I always thought violence meant a punch in the face, a knife to the throat, but the students at this college meant whenever you felt violated. That could be anytime.” She adds: “The tree violates the view.”

She recalls an actual murder at the college, and comes up with an alternative definition: “I know violence has to mean what it says, and it shuts everybody up when it says it.”

Schiff’s women are conflicted about their electronic gear. In ‘http://www.msjiz/boxx374/mpeg,’ a character whose father has died stumbles onto one of his favourite porn sites, which has videos of bosomy women boxing topless. Seeing this troubles her. Then she thinks, “Well, what was he supposed to be looking at? Girls of the Herman D Weiss Center for Radiology and Oncology? Bald Sluts? Barely Breathing?”

The problem with our glow-bug screens, these stories suggest, is that they promise on a vast scale but deliver so little. In another story, a young man with cancer turns his struggle into a kind of permanent media campaign, a pixelated busyness under which the narrator spies desolation and a lesson about how, finally, none of us are linked in.

“My cancer patient was blogging every day like it was his last,” the female narrator, an observer, writes in ‘The Lucky Lady.’ “He dunked himself in icy waterfalls to ring in the New Year. He waded out into the middle of freezing lakes in trunks that showed off his tattoos, his scars. He went white-water rafting with amputees. He proposed to his girlfriend in song. Everything was recorded, linked to, tweeted, retweeted. But at night, he still had cancer.”

What is it about the Internet that sucks your heart out, as if through a series of tubes? That makes you feel you’re not going to make it through the night, much less the year? One of Schiff’s narrators punches out an email and says: “We used to call it the World Wide Web, but at some point the world had dropped out. The wide was gone. It was a narrow web connecting us to those who would never love us back.”

There are 23 stories in The Bed Moved. Several first appeared in the literary magazine n + 1. A few are quite short, a page or two. A few wander a bit aimlessly, get lost and sit down. Once or twice the prose verges on the precious. (“I cried because I had never touched a mop before.”)

These are misdemeanors. If these stories are not the real thing, they’re such a good imitation of it that the distinction is meaningless. Schiff has an almost Nabokovian boldness and crispness of phrase. Nabokov summarised a death in two words: “picnic, lightning.” Schiff condenses a woman’s college years: “Nietzsche, penetration.”

Beneath Schiff’s crispness is a sense of strong spirits under duress, of heartbreak over the many things that can and will let you down.