Pocket Book Review # 8

Babylon and Other Stories, by Alix Ohlin



"Babylon" is a fine, fine collection of stories propelled by Alix Ohlin's deadpan, offbeat humor. The stories fit her style perfectly; they all seem to be about things flying apart. And there is a wonderful combination of absurdity and drama in them. What's strange but also compelling about Olin's stories is the way the comedy doesn't release the tension, but tightens it.

In "Land of the Midnight Sun" a Russian boy named Yuri just shows up one day on the front step of the house of Maxine, a high school student home alone doing her trig homework. She answers the door, a car honks and drives away, and there he is.

"I am exchange student," Yuri says. "I live in your house one year." Yuri explains that, after one year, Maxine can live in his house in Russia if she wants. "It is glasnost program," he says.

"It's like nobody tells me anything," she says.

She shows him around the house. When she explains that everyone calls her younger brother Bat, because his room is like a cave, Yuri says, "You are talking of the mouse with wings."

What follows is a charming coming of age story that ends with Maxine, years later, visiting Moscow, married and struggling to remember the encounter she and Yuri shared at Carlsbad Caverns, where they went to see the bats fly out in droves before sunset.

She remembers how she and Yuri "had walked up the hill out of the darkness of the Caverns," Olin writes, "his fingers brushing against hers, furtive, barely there, yet electric. They emerged into the sudden, blinding desert sun and it shocked her, as if they'd been expecting midnight."