A Dark Read> MDI summer resident honored for short stories

Rain was splashing the streets when the writer Alice Elliott Dark pulled up in front of a coffee shop in Montclair, N.J., where she lives. She raised her umbrella, grabbed a canvas L.L. Bean bag, and dashed for the door.

It was Saturday, and the restaurant crackled with weekend conversation and rustling toddlers. Dark, who was dressed warmly and unfussily, moved to the middle of the restaurant where she took a seat and ordered a a big breakfast and a cafe latte.

By her own estimation, Dark, who spends summers on Mount Desert Island, does not fit neatly into this suburban scene, but surely the characters in her short stories could easily feel comfortable making — or unmaking — their lives in this clubby neighborhood. When it’s not rush hour, Montclair is a 20-minute bus ride from Manhattan and, with Italianate and Tudor houses, stone manors and Cotswold cottages on lawn-perfect streets named after trees, the town has historically been one of the most picturesque suburbs in America.

Like John Cheever before her, Dark ponders the inner world and emotional blindsidings of people not too different from many of those in Montclair’s privileged community. Like Edith Wharton and Flannery O’Connor, she catches them at their most vulnerable, when they smack head-on into painful epiphanies.

In her newest collection of short stories, “In the Gloaming,” Dark laments their choices, but she sees through their social stratagems to their humanity. Her tone is often serious, but can also be subtly humorous.

“It’s very easy to be judgmental of the WASPs,” said Dark. “It’s an easy target as a culture. But I didn’t want to do that. The basic theme of the book is not just people’s desire to communicate, but the compulsion to communicate against all odds. It’s not necessarily characters communicating with other people but with themselves.”

Among her works, including a much-praised earlier collection of stories “Naked to the Waist,” the most famous is the short story titled “In the Gloaming,” about a mother caring for her son who is dying from AIDS. The piece has been made into two TV movies, and was included in John Updike’s 1999 collection “The Best American Short Stories of the Century.”

It’s not so easy carrying the torch for affluent people and their problems in a national readership that makes underdogs, oppression, ethnicity and gender-bending the stuff of best sellers. The author Benilde Little, who also lives in Montclair and who writes about upper-class blacks, said she and Dark have sometimes been critically flogged for covering that territory.

“The assumption is if you have money, you’re OK,” said Little, whose two novels “Good Hair” and “The Itch” were both best sellers. “It’s just the opposite, I think. You’re not worried about survival. You’re worried about your soul.”

Indeed, Dark’s characters are not OK. On the surface, their lives are marred by sexual abuse, marital infidelity, Alzheimer’s — to name a few of the stings that pulse in this collection. These topics fade, however, and the force of human emotion takes over. The characters bleed as they struggle to make sense of their anguish and disappointment. Dark bolsters them with meticulous prose, and the melancholic and narrative tenderness can sometimes read like poetry.

“Alice’s voice is different from anyone else writing today,” said the novelist Christina Baker Kline, who also lives in Montclair and grew up in Bangor. As with the members of the larger community of writers in Montclair, the three women — Kline, Little and Dark — sometimes get together and talk about works in progress — which also includes their small children.

“Our customers take great pride in being from a town with so many writers in it,” said Margot Sage-EL, owner of Watchung Booksellers, one of three book stores in Montclair. “We are a suburb without being an empty suburb.”

The suburb of Dark’s characters echo from somewhere back in her own WASPy upbringing in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she went to prep school and then to the University of Pennsylvania. As a child, she went to camp in Maine and began a lifelong relationship with the state.

Dark’s choices — to study Chinese in school, to teach writing at a community-based program in New York City as well as at Bard College, to work as a solitary writer — have set her apart from career moms who balance corporate jobs and family life.

But in Maine, Dark said, she has a sense of home.

“Maine is one of two places that’s so completely ingrained in my emotional life,” said Dark. (The other is Bryn Mawr.) “Maine has had a strong influence on me and I think about living there. But I feel very reluctant to make any claims. I’m a summer person.”

While Maine shows up in her fiction, Dark sets many of her stories in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Wynnemoor. Tennis courts and studio apartments and airports are the backdrop to the jolting stabs of intimate life — and death.

The scenes are not too different from ones Dark knows in her own family history. Her father died when she was 7, her mother remarried a wealthy man 40 years older, and the family went through the strains of blending lifestyles and children. The ride was ardently bumpy, and Dark, who can be both cheery and introverted, often felt like an outsider.

“My experience in life has been harsh,” said Dark, who then paused as if catching herself in a stratagem. “Not nearly as harsh as a lot of people on this planet. But my worldview is definitely: You can try to have a happy time, but something bad will happen.”

That’s not to say Dark’s life hasn’t also been good. First, there’s her marriage with Larry Dark, who edits the O. Henry Awards.

“I got married because I saw that I could be a writer if he were my husband,” Dark said. “He was intelligent and, emotionally, he understood.”

And, of course, there’s their 8-year-old son.

“Now I know the most important role is being a mother,” said Dark, who is currently working on a novel. “But to me, that’s private. Out in the world, the role I want to play is writer.”