BUGSY AND OTHER STORIES
By Rafael Frumkin
Simon & Schuster. 206 pp. Paperback, $16.99.
In his gutsy collection, “Bugsy and OTher Stories,” Rafael Frumkin presents characters in untraditional situations who are threatened by internal and external forces as they strive to stake out a joyful place in the world.
In the title story, Bugsy, a college student struggling with repressed queer desire and debilitating depression, finds a sense of belonging by moving into a commune-like house of women who make sadomasochistic queer porn. There, one of the women, Stella, a versatile performer and committed polyamorist, unlocks Bugsy’s capacity for sexual exploration, but when Stella decides that she no longer wants to be polyamorous and wants to be in a monogamous relationship with a guy named Cody instead, it sends Bugsy into a spiral of paranoid ideation.
Mental illness resurfaces in a story about a therapist experiencing a break of his own. He blacks out, slices up his arm and hallucinates that an aggressive Alex Trebek verbally abuses him. Meanwhile, he stubbornly continues to treat his patients, eventually showing up at one’s home to deliver an urgent, incomprehensible message that his empathetic patient interprets as a cry for help. In an affecting scene, she comforts him with lessons she has learned while in his care.
Frumkin renders focal points like crisis and desire with compelling fluidity: His characters navigate the complexities of self-discovery against the constantly shifting background of psychological slippage and the pressures of making a life worth living. For instance, a story about the celebrity e-girl Dina Valentine, who is in love with her best friend and roommate, Aubrey, keeps the reader on a knife’s edge about whether Dina’s attempts to prevent Aubrey from seeing her boyfriend will be successful, with the nature of Aubrey’s own desire a powerful opacity until the story’s end.
But the collection’s greatest strength is its way of unpacking its characters’ stuck moments and impasses through vivid gasps of insight, moments when we come into contact with the abundance of their inner life. For each of them, the obscure whole of their identity is beyond easy summarization — but as they grope their way through crises both existential and mundane, every moment feels bracingly true.