Emma Cline’s stories are at their best when telling coming-of-age tales

Two of my favorite recent novels are The Guest and The Girls, both by Emma Cline, who is also accumulating quite a few short stories. I’ve started to dig into those and, like her novels, it seems Cline’s specialty is to present everyday typical happenings - nothing too astounding - that tend to illuminate larger truths about people and their relationships. 

“Upstate” appeared in the October 30, 2023 issue of The New Yorker. In it, Paul is a recently divorced man in his 50s dating a younger woman named Kate. They are leaving the city for a short vacation “upstate.” The fact that they aren’t right for each other is pretty clear from the start. He gets annoyed by her suggestion that his 17-year-old daughter is too young for her planned nose job.  She secretly thinks he’s lost and adrift in life. The things they agree on are drinking a lot of alcohol together and that the owner of the house they are staying in is creepy. By the end, a lot of this may be in their heads rather than actual reality, but it doesn’t much matter because Paul has fallen out of the hammock and faces a surprisingly long road to recovery. She, it appears, is stuck with him, whether they like it or not. 3.5 out of 5 stars

The other Cline short stories I’ve read are from her 2020 collection entitled Daddy.

In “What Can You Do With a General,” kids come back home to visit their parents at Christmas to a town in California. Nothing much happens except the small little pricks of pain that slowly tear families apart as kids grow older. It’s pretty touching if not profound. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

The second offering in the collection is my favorite Cline short story. It paints a picture with a similar vibe to her novels. “Los Angeles” is about two girls, Alice and Oona, who work at a trendy clothing shop while trying to live the L.A. dream. They enjoy experiencing somewhat risky sexual situations mainly so they can tell each other their wild stories afterwards. Selling the underwear they have on at work is one of their side gigs, and it may just get aspiring actress Alice in serious trouble by the story’s conclusion. 5 out of 5 stars

In “Menlo Park,” a man in the publishing world suffers a series of setbacks, from getting fired to relationship struggles to a scary airplane moment to an incident with the contact in one of his eyes. He hopes he can catch a break at some point, which seems unlikely. The story is readable but inessential, a little outside of Cline's most winning formula of spinning yarns about girls coming of age. 3 out of 5 stars