GINA BERRIAULT CAME into life and her own very acute state of sensitivity and awareness during the late 1920s in one of our dimmer coastal towns—Long Beach was then so parochial it was known as “Iowa-by-the-Sea.”

Richard Yates, in his tribute to Berriault’s work, calls her California “that warm and dismaying place.” Here she is, in the title story from this volume, describing a street in just such a town:

Every house had a palm tree and a lawn, and some had a piano inside, a dark, sternly upright object in its own realm called the living room. Delia and her family had no piano and therefore no living room. (p. 139)

The story is set during The Great Depression, as the world hovers anxiously on the brink of war. Childhood, in these stories, is filled with foreboding, tragedy all but foretold: this girl’s father will die, her mother will go blind, as did Gina’s own.

The ordinary lives you’ll read of in this collection play out always against just such a vast scrim of darkness and risk, which resonates profoundly—given economic and environmental uncertainties—with our own sense of apprehension and unease.

We meet Berriault’s characters in astonishing intimacy, as they come to existential realizations: life is short, love is brief, beauty fragile, all sense of order imperiled. It is only the realm of Art—symbolized by the music Delia’s family cannot afford—that can save us. It’s in the coherence offered by great painting and music and writing that we all may find a sense of larger meaning, were we granted access.

That we feel oddly conforted by the dark beauty of these stories is simply another of Gina Berriault’s

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