Sardonic and elegant: Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s Ghost Pains

Hell, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people. Jessi Jezewska Stevens would nominate parties. Social catastrophe can stem from the invitation: “Email!” she laments. “The way all modern tragedies begin.” She homes in on the space between what a woman thinks and says and does. Her anti-heroines can be relied on to make wrong decisions — men, marriage, nipple-piercing and, of course, parties. The choice invariably ends in failure.

Ghost Pains is a collection of eleven stories, sardonic and elegant, imbued with a sense of isolation and self-awareness. Stevens’s women throw spectacularly disastrous parties. And attend them. The result can be amusing for the reader while being grievous for the protagonists

The stories are world-hoppers, set in Italy, America, Siberia, Krakow and Berlin. Events are seen askance, from an outsider’s point of view. In “Honeymoon,” a newly-wed overdoses on culture in Tuscany: “I got distracted by our collective struggle to Renaissance ourselves. One cannot gawk one’s way into personal transformation.” Stevens’s characters are strangers to spontaneity: “There are certain people for whose arrival one would like to be prepared — Hitler; your mother-in-law; yourself when you’re high and suddenly confronted by a mirror.” Or, on one occasion, an ex-lover.

In “Gettysburg” there’s a rare instance of a happy marriage — tenderly observed and lovingly detailed. But its final paragraph questions the future. Another story is a knife-edge account of two people in a war-zone city rediscovering each other on their phones while outside lethal drones and searchlights watch and wait. Stevens illustrates the fragility of their connection with compassionate precision.

She returns often to Berlin, where gatherings veer from calamity to nightmare. A Futurist dinner party offers “deconstructed spaghetti that spilled over tables and on to brown paper on the floor; here a pile of limpid noodles, there a red lake of sauce.” On another night, “the party swelled around the new arrivals, feeding on them like fish.” Elsewhere, abandoning reality for a parallel universe, Stevens has fun with fantasy, looking at the elusive nature of crypto and the consequences of an unwitting Faustian pact. All our paranoid techno-dread is here: be careful what you wish for.

Big questions break the flippant surface. Stevens can see the skull beneath the skin: “We carry death within us like a stone within a fruit” the narrator of one story observes, adapting Rilke. Reality is mutable, happiness fleeting; pain lurks.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.