‘The Pretty Girl’ keeps reader off balance

In her collection “The Pretty Girl” (Four Way Books, 321 pages, $17.95), Debra Spark introduces us to a number of characters who seem to thrive on creating and maintaining ambiguity. Sparks, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, offers up protagonists who are struggling to understand the seemingly inexplicable or who misunderstand something that seems clear. While they might find the human source of the confusion, they seldom grasp the motivation behind its creation. The reader is often left as off balance as the shaken characters.

Art and artifice are also at the heart of these tales and serve the theme of ambiguity as the reader and the characters wrestle with the connection - or lack of connection - between artistic expression and “real life” (a consideration complicated by the fact that we are reading works of short fiction).

Spark's protagonists are seldom happy with the ofttimes smug individuals they encounter. “You just have to accept that the unknown is a part of life,” a playwright explains to Ginny, the central character in “I Should Let You Go.” She considers a couple of responses: “How visionary of you, Ginny might have said. Or: (expletive) you.”

The reader might feel some of that same frustration with Spark herself, but the mysterious motivations and unanswered questions are a key part of what make these stories successful. In fact, in the book's title novella, it might be argued that Spark reveals too much in the end. The mysteries of the first half of the story are nearly fully explained in the second half. While “The Pretty Girl” is a wholly successful tale, it is less haunting than some of the messier stories that follow.

Book reading

What: Debra Spark reads from “The Pretty Girl”

Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Cost: Free