Perkus reminds the narrator of a self-portrait of Edvard Munch, showing "the painter wide-eyed and whiskered, shrunken within his clothes," and he takes charge of the narrator's aesthetic education, loading him up with essential tapes and DVDs, and lecturing him about everyone from Chet Baker to Myrna Loy to John Cassavetes. Although Perkus could easily have degenerated, in the hands of a less skillful writer, into a collection of odd traits pasted haphazardly together, Lethem manages in these pages to make him a palpable and oddly moving figure.
Miranda July's sad-funny tale Roy Spivey also pivots around an oddball character: A Hollywood heartthrob who flirts with his seatmate on a long plane flight, sprays her down with Febreze, (yes, Febreze fabric spray: read the story, it's too complicated to explain) and makes her, for an instant, envision a different life for herself. He gives her a phone number minus one digit, which he makes her memorize. That missing number is four, and for years four will be a talisman to her, a lucky number to be whispered at times of passion or stress.
Only years later, after she has married and settled into a humdrum life, does she realize that Roy Spivey might have actually wanted her to call him, that giving her the number wasn't just the playful gesture of a movie star, but an attempt at genuine connection. But when she tries the number, it doesn't work: "I looked down at the number and felt a tidal swell of loss. It was too late. I had waited too long."
In Hanwell Snr, Smith maps her hero's relationship with his irresponsible and frequently absent father, who he keeps imagining will one day confess his regrets. In Nigora, Adam Thirlwell uses a discontented wife's musings about the men in her life, past and present and future, to chart this woman's disappointments and hopes, and to delineate her own sense of self.
And in Gordon Andrew O'Hagan sketches out the life of a writer in eight staccato takes, which give the reader both a real sense of Gordon's life (from a boyhood football injury to his bookish adolescence in Scotland to the publication of his first book) and a sense of how brief and inconsequential many people's lives can be.
Other tales in this volume feel overly pat or mechanically perfunctory, as if they'd been tossed off to complete an annoying assignment. J. Johnson by Hornby (with illustrations by Posy Simmonds) is a silly and unilluminating send-up of the blurbs about authors that appear on book jackets. The Liar by Aleksandar Hemon is a predictable parable that plays with the biography of Jesus. And Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz by Heidi Julavits devolves from a promising portrait of a difficult old woman into an overly ironic tale with a cheap, O. Henry-esque conclusion.
In the end, the reader of this volume will most likely hopscotch through this collection, skipping over the less satisfying entries to focus on its few gems. Indeed, the strongest stories in The Book of Other People should serve as introductions to their authors' oeuvres, enticing the reader to investigate further the work of writers like Edwidge Danticat, Jonathan Lethem and Colm Toibin.
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