Not Where I Started From: Stories (First Edition)

Kate Wheeler's stories feature peripatetic Americans who seek love or enlightenment - or both - in far-flung corners of the globe. A startling mixture of gentle irony, mischievous humor, and unexpected danger marks the paths of all these characters as they follow their circuitous routes toward happiness. As the New York Times said, "Wheeler has a capacity for compressing the insights of cross-cultural dislocation into deliciously memorable epiphanies."

Many of Wheeler's protagonists in this hypnotic debut collection of 10 stories are Americans in exotic cultures, seeking love or spiritual enlightenment. In "Improving My Average," a lonely rich American girl raised in Colombia attempts to rescue her servant from an unscrupulous fiance, only to discover the abyss between her own privileged life and theirs. In "Manikarnika," a computer graduate student on leave in India learns that her abusive father has committed suicide and finds an emotional anchor in an unpretentious guru. Wheeler, a one-time Buddhist nun in Burma who is now an O. Henry and Pushcart Award-winning author based in Massachusetts, does not spin gauzy New Agey scenarios but rather writes smart, tough-minded tales full of verve, wit, irony and a deft human touch. Her nervy women break out of self-made traps, whether it's a Kansas dishwasher who runs away from her domineering, older husband ("Judgment"), a transplanted New Yorker who is down-and-out in Miami's Little Havana ("Mr. Peanut"), or a neurotic dancer who can't get over her married ex-lover in Paris ("My Most Recent, Perfect Knight"). A highly original, delightful writer, Wheeler is on a par with Paul Theroux or Doris Lessing in her serendipitous explorations of cultural collisions.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two stories in Wheeler's impressive first collection take locus from her own experience as a (now disrobed) Buddhist nun in Burma--``Under the Roof'' and ``Ringworm''--and these have an unstrained shapeliness born of intimate knowledge. Here and in other stories, too, Wheeler's spiritual pilgrims aren't airheads, not particularly ``lost'' in the tangible world; nor do they set themselves up for the disappointments they meet. Just the right blend of realism (``Over here''--referring to India--``causality was cooked up in one's blind spot'') and ardor informs their religious dreams. But this is due less to the inherent subject matter of asceticism, gurus, and inner vows than to Wheeler's fine general knack for what the Russian formalists used to call ``making it strange.'' Her stories of an American girl's life growing up in South America--``Improving My Average,'' ``Urbino''--have the same spiky shifts of tone, and are thus allowed to seem more random and convincing than the ordinary culture-transplant story. Wheeler's wise eye and style--at times comparable to Mavis Gallant's in effect--are so sharp they sometimes get away from her (``If only I could have photographed the jellied chunk of time I spent under Miami Aiport, waiting for the rental agency's minibus. Concourses coiled overhead like the labyrinth of an enormous cement ear....The light, fibrillating green fluorescence was interrupted by slashes of void between which too tan women walked past toward imminent reunions...'')--but letting too little sneak by is no literary sin, especially in a debut collection. Strong, messy, frequently indelible work by a new talent. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.