On "Easy Go" by Mary Beth Caschetta (3403 words) ***

Maybe I'm just dense, but I wasn't really expecting what eventually occurs in this story, and I liked that. It's a tale of a woman whose husband has left her, her psychologist husband. And as expected, she has some problems with that and needs counseling, needs something to get her through. That's really all I want to say, lest I spoil it. But as far as tales of psychologists go, this story seems to have a bit in common with Nabokov's Pnin, another tale of a spouse jilted by a psychologist partner. It's interesting how psychologists in literature and film are often of two extremes--one the hero who saves the day, as in Real People and Good Will Hunting; and one a horrible, self- or politically motivated fraud, as in the aforementioned Pnin or that episode of Cheers where the person in therapy ends up having an affair with the therapist. But I guess I'm not thinking of Alan Thicke in Growing Pains, where psychology seemed to be just a nice job to pay the bills while working from home. Anyway, ponder the portrayal of psychologists in pop culture all you want, but you might want to read the story here at the Del Sol Review first.

On "Small Town Seventeen--An American Triptych" by Ann Garvin (768 words)***

Madison Smartt Bell's Zero dB and Other Stories has at least two of these--stories split into thirds. In his collection, as I recall, the tryptichs are more images that work off of one another than pieces that one can make sense of in terms of plot. Garvin's short short has that feeling as well--simple moments from this one girl's life, as she prepares to go off to college and what that means regarding men (good and bad). Read it through a second time, and the plot emerges, the fact that this is all one night, that the first tryptich is about . . . But why tell you all this when you can read it for yourself here at the Del Sol Review.