If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

Robin Black’s collection, “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This,” was published last month by Random House.

Ever since I read this collection, the word ricocheting around my brain is “solid.” These stories are solid and steady, in the best sense of an authorial surefootedness. There is precise and simple language. These are not voice-driven stories with flair, but quiet stories about cheating husbands and illnesses of all stripes. The nearest analogy might be Alice Munro.

In the first story, a father takes his blind (and charismatic) daughter to pick up a seeing-eye dog. The angst of the story (because writers don’t talk about plot, they talk about angst), comes from the father’s anger against the boy who blinded her, and from the secret about his marriage that he’s keeping from his daughter.

The title cheap pharmacy online no prescription needed story, told as an imaginary diatribe to a neighbor, relates how a minor scuffle over a property line takes on epic proportions in light of health tragedies befalling a couple. It has a raw, honest feeling to it, heightened by the stripped-down prose (a style Raymond Queneau might call “notation”). It’s an excellent reminder of what it means to be a neighbor, and how we fail to be neighbors in the highest sense of that word because we fail to imagine the other’s perspective.

The journals where the stories first appeared include Indiana Review, Southern Review, One Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, and one I’m unfamiliar with, “Freight Stories.” If you’d like to hear more from her, she has an interview at “The American Prospect” where she laments the frequency of older feminine characters.