![]() Raeburn, telling him that the boy and she went home and made out, but she senses the doctor doesn’t believe her, and it leaves her with an odd feeling. ![]() Dina denies it, covering up by talking about a boy with nice shoes she met once while walking home with groceries, how he was kind and cute and offered to help her carry her groceries home she conveniently leaves out that this offer made her freak out as she didn’t want a nice boy to see the poor area and home she lived in, and she ran from him. Raeburn, who asks Dina why she was so obsessed with the invitation to the gay party, and if she had ever had any romantic interest, following it up by saying he believes she’s having an identity crisis. ![]() We soon return to another meeting with Dr. ![]() Swiftly is the most painless way, Dina tells Heidi as she personally compares the mouse and her mother’s death but voices none of her genuine internal dialogue, heartless as she makes sure Heidi kills the mouse right. Soon after, Dina and Heidi sign up as dishwashers in one of the Yale dining halls, leading to Dina showing Heidi how to kill a mouse stuck in the wall grates. Heidi tells Dina about how she’s going on a date with the boy who was spreading rumors, and Dina grows unreasonably upset about this, anger only increasing when a boy hands them an invitation to a gay party. Heidi continues to try to befriend Dina until eventually, she convinces her to come to the dining hall together. Raeburn, an old, mellow man briefly, Dina mentions how she hates her father. Dina shortly meets her assigned psychiatrist, Dr. The stranger turns out to be a young woman named Heidi who has a poetry class with Dina, and Heidi regales her troubles of a boy spreading rumors about their hook up, to which Dina said she thought she was a lesbian, and Heidi says she thought the same of Dina It leads to denial from both, Dina stating she likes no one at all, rejecting Heidi’s advances at friendliness. Soon into this, a white stranger knocks on her door, crying, asking to be let in Dina does not let her in until the stranger starts to recite a poem Dina loves, at which Dina throws open the door and calls her a plagiarist. This statement lands her a year of psychiatric counseling and intrusive visits by campus staff in the name of her health, which she rebuts and avoids. Their world excludes love, friendship, even affection their fragile sense of self can be maintained only by keeping other people out.“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by ZZ Packer is a story that follows Dina, a young, poor black woman with unsteady identity through her first year at Yale Dina is a surly, self-described misanthrope, singled out on her very first day of class when she says that if she were an object, she would be a revolver so that she could wipe out all of mankind. The deliberate solitude of Packer’s central characters can sometimes make them seem merely brattish. The most difficult problem raised by the collection is the tension between Packer’s intense individualism and her equally intense commitment to black civil rights. Her central characters are never team players. Packer’s stories express a deep mistrust of communal action. She shows her range not by depicting people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, as Zadie Smith does, but by exploring the complexity of the black experience. At her best, Packer combines her political vision with an impressive lightness of touch. Packer can be very funny, making us see and laugh at the gulf between our expectations, prejudices or rhetoric, and reality. The central characters themselves are fully alive, and each story shows that race is only one element in their sense of themselves as people apart. It is a world already populated by clamoring, sorrowing, eminently knowable people, and with the promise of more to come. Instead, there is a sense of a talented writer testing and pushing at those limits, ringing as many changes as possible within her fictional world. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is not really limited by this. Young writers, naturally enough, write about young characters. Packer does her best writing about characters who are coming of age in one way or another, like Doris, the teenager in 'Doris Is Coming'. Packer's debut collection reminds us that no stylistic tour de force - or authorial gamesmanship, or flights of language - can ground a story like a well-realized character. Tensions are internalized or they explode into violence or both. Characters are squeezed between competing assumptions and proscriptions, both societal and familial. the obstacles to achieving identity are more complicated than the obvious ones, such as our grievous racial history.
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