Kiss Me

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo).

The 13 stories in Kiss Me illuminate moments of surprising gladness and
quiet doom. Andrew Pyper knows that love often fails us miserably,
leaving us scanning the landscape in astonishment.

The title story details the long, delicate collapse of a relationship
after the narrator burns his face off at a backyard barbecue. In
“Sausage Stew,” a jaded young woman’s account of a one-night stand
(the man had ended up “with two shattered knees from jumping out of
his window after he called her the next day and she told him to get over
it, it was nothing, what did he expect? Commitment?”) obliquely
prepares us for her heroin habit. In “Breaking and Entering,” the
narrator feels woefully inadequate as he oversees his father’s
funeral. He describes greeting the mourners, wondering “when I was
going to be asked what I was planning to do after I graduated.” Later,
when he’s bested by a cocky midnight intruder in his father’s house,
that sense of foolishness and failure is magnified. Pyper understands
humiliation, in both public and private arenas.

The stories are unrelated, and all but one have first-person narrators;
reading them sequentially is an exercise in jumpiness. The collection
would also have benefited from a few more commas. Still, it’s an
inventive and pleasing debut.