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106 Drum: READS
Book
Reviews
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
ZZ Packer
Canongate: £7.99 (softcover)
Wake up and smell the coffee
It’s not only novels that can be thought provoking. Matt Taylor finds ZZ
Packer’s debut collection of short stories bristling with ideas and vivid
characters and with a true-to-life aversion to simple endings.
D
rinking Coffee Elsewhere is
the kind of collection that
almost seems written to
defy description. The eight stories
it comprises draw together a remarkable cast of black characters, male
and female, of differing religious
views and sexualities, of questionable moralities, living in different
cities, even countries. Perhaps the
one unifying theme is Packer’s clear
fascination with the shadow side
of human nature.
There is no doubt that ZZ Packer is
a very talented writer; she has an
uncanny ability to throw together
curious combinations of words to
produce descriptions so apt that you
feel you’ve always known them;
take for example, “…the white girls
who traded pocket mirrors,
lipsticking themselves like fouryear-olds determined to crayon one
spot to a waxy patch” or “Crying
had turned her face the color of
raw chicken.”
Perhaps the only thing sometimes
lacking in these stories is a sense
of resolution. Packer is fond of
ambiguity in all its forms and more
often than not prefers to leave the
reader to decide the eventual
outcome of the situations into
which she thrusts her characters.
In Every Tongue Shall Confess,
nurse Clareese Mitchell falls victim
to the hypocrisy and abuse of the
Greater Christ Emmanuel
Pentecostal Church of the Fire
Baptized which so controls her
view of the world that in the face
of endless human suffering at the
hospital where she works, she
clings to her faith by concluding
that, “No one has a right to live!
The only right we have is to die.
That’s it!” Her encounter with an
unbelieving patient in the form of
amputee Cleophus Sanders offers
her the chance of some form of
redemption but will she accept it?
Packer doesn’t make it clear.
In Our Lady of Peace, Lynnea
moves to Baltimore where she trains
as a teacher. Classroom control
evades her and she’s even attacked
by one girl who refuses to leave
when told to. All the stress takes its
toll and the story ends as Lynnea
does something entirely out of
character. What happens next, however, is left to the reader to imagine.
Geese draws a thought provoking
parallel between wartime kamikaze
pilots and the choice the woman
finally makes to break free. (It’s not
what you might think.) Meanwhile
Brownies challenges us to look at
what happens when those who are
usually the victims of racism, begin
to project the accusation onto
innocent bystanders.
Perhaps in the end, Drinking
Coffee Elsewhere, really does defy
description. The best solution
would be to buy the book and a
cappuccino and settle down to
decide for yourself.