Do the Windows Open?: Fiction

In an interconnected anthology of short stories, a freelance photographer and macrobiotics devotee pursues her art, capturing in a series of vignettes the hilarious horrors, mishaps, and foibles of modern life. A first collection. 15,000 first printing.

It's surprising that Hecht, a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and a winner of the O. Henry Prize, hasn't published a book before this. These nine stories are all narrated by the same bracingly neurotic heroine, a 40-ish photographer named Isabelle who has a lot to say on virtually everything from the intricacies of macrobiotic cooking to whether or not her optician is or was a Nazi, the son of Nazis, a neo-Nazi or, at the very least, a Nazi sympathizer. When she's not working on her idiosyncratic photo-essays (flowers in decline, reproductive surgeons and their dogs), Isabelle spends an inordinate amount of time chasing down objects essential for her daily life, like organic vegetables and reversible alpaca coats from England. Meanwhile, she keeps up a barrage of exceedingly manic diatribes on such pressing subjects as the greenhouse effect, the passage of time and how annoying Swedish people can be?all expressed in borderline hysterical, impeccably crisp diction, like Miss Manners with the wrong prescription. The best of these stories are hilariously funny, filled with the horrors of modern life (bad architecture, traffic jams, the smell of peanuts on the bus) and wacky exchanges with her loudmouthed reproductive surgeon, Dr. Loquesto, her careless floor sander, the guy at the Discount Drugs or her neighbors in Nantucket and East Hampton. Some of the stories may remind the reader of a long phone conversation with a batty, obsessed neighbor who doesn't know when to hang up. You may breathe a little sigh of relief when they're over?but then again, her point of view is so entertaining, you can't wait for her to call back.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hecht debuts with stories woven from seemingly uneventful threads of life that are made as funny, compelling, and rewarding as a reader ever could wish. The nine pieces' narrator is in her early 40s, married, childless, a sometime resident of New York City now living in East Hampton and summering in Nantucket. Such locales might suggest a white-glove elite, but this character is no such type. Money goes unmentioned, it's true (the husband is a university dean), but Hecht's invariably engaging person is far too timid, droll, and bumbling to be a mover or shaker of much of anything. In ``Perfect Vision'' (a slow start), she's certain that an optician is an ex- Nazi, while in the much finer title story her fear of driving leads her to ride the ``South Fork bus,'' an experience as richly peopled in its understated modern way as a ride down the river might once have been with Mark Twain. Hecht's heroine is a strict vegetarian (``I knew that the Swedes liked to commit suicide, and if this was their diet, maybe it was the reason'') and pursues a career in photography that most recently involves photographing ``seven doctors and their dogs,'' the most prominent doctor being the famous ``reproductive surgeon, Dr. Loquesto,'' who always yells, never opens windows (``A Lovely Day''), and performs a ``medical procedure'' on his photographer-patient (``I Couldn't See a Thing''), who's not about to reveal exactly what the surgery is, though hints may be hidden in the gorgeously intricate ``The Thrill Is Gone'' (looking for the source of ``My heart leaps up''), or in the melancholy ``Were the Ornaments Lovely?'' (meeting two strange brothers), or even in ``The World of Ideas,'' with its glance back to the promise of the last century (``But this was the new world. What kind of world was it? It was some other kind of world, and there was no escape''). Droll, intricate, hilarious, sad: a humane, serious, funny, altogether captivating voice. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hecht is hilarious. This original and nimble short story writer explores our end-of-the-millennium angst through the medium of her bright, eloquent, and neurotic narrator, Isabelle, a photographer whose subjects include "flowers in decline" and doctors with their dogs. Isabelle is a riot; preternaturally observant and routinely terrified, she suffers through an inordinate amount of dental work, wears dark glasses at all times, and is afraid of buses with windows that don't open and buildings with no windows at all. Every trip into Manhattan from her Long Island home becomes an act of courage and a shock to the senses as she recoils from crowds, traffic, pollution, lousy food, noise, and hideous architecture ("When you see this building you can think only one thing. `WHY?'"). Hecht's turns of phrase are as efficient and devastating as the moves of a tae kwon do master, and her narrator's fantastic surges of fear and loathing, and almost operatic worrying (she loves Mozart) are exhilarating and cathartic. Donna Seaman