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Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Z.Z. Packer. Riverhead: 2003 (hardcover).
ISBN: 1573222348. 238 pages.
Guide not available
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"By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909." So begins "Brownies," the first story in Z.Z. Packer's much-awaited debut -- a collection of smart, edgy, beautifully crafted stories that capture the harrowing personal journeys of her young black characters.
Published in The New Yorker's debut fiction issue and in Best American Short Stories, 2000, Packer's stories are provocative and one-of-a-kind, recalling the best of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Each story is narrated by an outcast character struggling to find his or her place in a hostile world: the result is often furiously funny and always surprising. In the title story, Dina joins other new freshmen at Yale for orienation games; when asked what inanimate object she'd like to be, she chooses a revolver and thus begins her weekly visit to the university psychiatrist. "Every Tongue Shall Confess" features Clareese, the cross-eyed, devout choir director at the Greater Christ Emmanuel Pentecostal Church of the Fire Baptized, who finds love in a most unlikely place. In "The Ant of the Self," teen-aged Spurgeon sets off to the Million Man March with his loser con-man father and discovers not his proud black male self but "the ant of the self -- that small, blind, crumb-seeking part of ourselves." Packer's narrators are all wonderfully unique, but as the stories accumulate, the thematic core of the collection becomes visible: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a fierce expose, a look at what it's like to be young, black, wicked smart, and lost in America.
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