Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

In "Brownies" African-American girls stir a brouhaha with a dubious charge of having heard a racial epithet uttered by the white Brownies. The story in many ways is a funny and disturbing exploration of Groupthink whereby the black Brownies never really heard the epithet but get caught up in the self-righteousness and mission of their revenge. In "Every Tongue Shall Confess" a cross-eyed, homely lady, Clareese, plays by the rules, reads her Bible, and works hard as a nurse, only to be exploited by her church deacons who use her as a door mat. We cringe as we watch Clareese sink deeper and deeper into loneliness. In "Our Lady of Peace" a young woman takes on teaching in a public school in order to change nihilistic, lawless high school children, but in a reversal, the children make her a nihilistic misanthropist. The teacher Lynnea Davis not only begins to despise the children, but the teachers she works with. In the "Ant of the Self" a precocious teenage boy named Spurgeon must face the dilemmas of having an alcoholic bully of a father who drags his son to the Million-Man March where Spurgeon, the innocent party, is berated by rhetorically-inflamed black men to respect and love and appreciate his father for taking him to such a great event when in fact his hustler of a father simply took him to the march in order to sell a bunch of stolen exotic birds. In "Speaking in Tongues" a young girl runs away from home where her overly pious aunt subjects her to the abuses of a dysfunctional, abusive church. However, running away to Atlanta to find her mother, the young girl discovers that the secular world-full of pimps, hustlers, and libertines-offers no refuge.

For all the diversity of these stories, we can see Packer's general themes-her animosity against Groupthink, her loathing of convenient stereotypical thinking, her objection to the use of religion and false piety in order to bully others, her disdain for the manner in which clichés offer people false solutions and self-aggrandizement. Packer is a major writer tackling major themes and I am eagerly awaiting her next publication.


LOVE LOVE LOVE this collection   June 7, 2003
TNC Reviews (Lake Charles, LA)
28 out of 31 found this review helpful

I had previously read a few of ZZ Packer's stories in lit magazines such as ZOETROPE and The New Yorker and I have been anxiously awaiting this collection. I have not been disappointed.

"Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" is a collection of unique, startling and at times, brutally truthful stories by Packer, a new author. All these stories, in some way, touch upon themes of alienation, the search for truth (whatever that truth is for the characters), of approval, and of identity. Stories range from the title piece, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," about a young black woman who enters a ivy league university and must struggle not only with alienation and her identity but the death of her mother, to "Geese," a story about a sister who travels to Tokyo to make loads of money only to find herself destitute and in the company of people just as down and out as she is.

What I enjoy the most about these eight stories is that Packer tells stories about black people, but she does so multiculturally, or "realistically". The world isn't full of just black people or just white people. The worlds in Packer's stories travel the globe from Baltimore, to Yale University, to Tokyo. We see a vast array of people and places and situations, and Packer is not afraid to show us all these facets, nor is she afraid to show us the bleakness of reality. Her stories do not end with cotton candy and happily ever afters. Sometimes, life is hard, and Packer portrays these times exquisitely.

Anyone who is interested in reading well written stories about the facets of black life, will no doubt enjoy ZZ Packer's debut collection as much as I have.

Shon Bacon


Superb   March 18, 2003
S. Stone (Berkeley, CA USA)
20 out of 22 found this review helpful

The New York Times used the word "superb" in describing this story collection, and it seems completely justified. ZZ Packer has a largeness of spirit, an intellectual curiosity and subtlety, and a flair for marvelous dialogue to go with her brilliant storytelling. I've clipped several of these stories from The New Yorker or Harper's, and am so happy to finally have them in book form. If I were going to think of the writer these stories remind me of most, it would be Chekhov, though ZZ Packer is actually too distinctive in style and subject matter to be compared to anyone else. But, like Chekhov's, these stories have a moral dimension which has nothing to do with primness and everything to do with a sense of the grave consequences of our decisions, even when we're trying to do our best. Also the experience of reading these is a little like that of reading Chekhov's stories; it is impossible to guess where you are going next -- the turns in each story are both surprising and, in retrospect, absolutely convincing.

These stories take huge risks, and they earn them. One question I hear a lot these days is, "what is this writer loyal to?" ZZ Packer is loyal to a deep, beautiful, sometimes painful honesty. She knows how human beings behave, and she lets us experience that knowledge, but, like Chekhov, she has too much generosity and wisdom to condemn the people she describes. She knows exactly how it is that we sometimes find ourselves so far from home, in more ways than one. How can these stories be so truthful and such a pleasure to read?

Among all these beautiful stories, it's hard to pick out any one passage to show the grace, compression, readability, and fierce wit of the writing, but here is one of my favorites from the title story, where an older narrator describes her younger self locked in a struggle with the mostly privileged, mostly white world of Yale. This is from her reaction to the inane ice-breaking games at Orientation, when each person is asked to describe themselves as an object (the narrator has already been -- maddeningly, irrelevantly -- labeled by a counselor during a previous game):

"When it was my turn I said, "My name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I'd be a revolver." The sunlight dulled as if on cue. Clouds passed rapidly overhead, presaging rain. I don't know why I said it. Until that moment I'd been good in all the ways were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student -- though I'd learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with Mace."

If one of the purposes of real literature is to enlarge our ability to feel compassion for ourselves and others, then these stories do that. This may be her first book, but it's already clear that ZZ Packer is a great writer. These stories add to the richness of the world.


Moving and Memorable   March 23, 2003
Rusty (Chicago, IL USA)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

People tend to have enough to read, so I rarely foist new things on my friends to add to their pile. But I've made repeated exceptions for ZZ Packer since discovering the title story of this collection several years ago, which sent me scurrying to the library to find whatever else she had written. These emotionally complex and gutwrenching stories showcase a variety of African-American characters struggling to break free of their mental prisons, with realistically mixed results. Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, race is a context but "on the lower frequencies" (and not so lower ones) the characters speak for all of us. Plus the stories are simply good reads - events move fast and the tension rarely lets up until the finish.

Friends of the extraordinary, give this book a read!


fantastic debut   March 31, 2003
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

Z. Z. Packer has all the right credentials for a young writer: degrees from Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Stegner Fellowship, The New Yorker as her first publication, a contribution to The Best American Short Stories, and even a catchy, initialized name. It turns out that Z. Z. is what she's been called by family as long as she can remember and that all those blessings from the gods of the literary world have not made generic the intricacies of Packer's writing. This debut short story collection leaves readers contemplating the relationship of the despair and hope that collide as we become individuals in our world.

This book is a fantastic debut of eight stories, all except one of which runs between 20 and 30 pages. This length allows Packer the patience to let plot and character develop together. The longest story, "Speaking in Tongues," runs more than 50 pages to follow the church-going Tia on her search for her mother in the far-away streets of Baltimore, where, coincidentally, Packer taught in the public school system.

The strongest, most far-reaching, vivid stories are the opening "Brownies," the title story, and the closing "Doris Is Coming." All three are centered on young, female, African-American characters who struggle to come to terms with the contradictions they see in the society around them. In "Brownies," the narrator, nicknamed Snot ever since she sneezed on a classmate, is part of a group of Brownie Scouts who plan an ambush on another Brownie troop because a girl in Troop 909 has called the quiet Daphne a [bad name.] In "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," the narrator begins her life at Yale by telling the orientation counselor and the dean things they don't like to hear and by meeting up with voluptuous Heidi, who prefers to be called Henrik. In the final story of the collection, which is set in 1961, Doris questions civil disobedience. All three central characters must decide for themselves what appropriate and necessary action to take when they find they don't quite fit into their surroundings.

Z. Z. Packer is now working on a novel about the Buffalo Soldiers. She probably has an impressive career ahead of her, but readers have no need to wait--her debut story collection contains the writing of an already-mature and thoughtful writer. Packer's stories are polished and cohesive in surprising, complicated ways and are a pleasure to read and ponder.