Admit This to No One

In its review of Leslie Pietrzyk's first novel, Pears on a Willow Tree, the Washington Post described Pietrzyk as “a fully developed talent with a promising future.” Pietrzyk's latest book confirms the Post's evaluation.Admit This to No One is a collection of fourteen stories set in and about Washington, D.C.; eleven of the stories are linked by a group of characters orbiting around the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and five other stories randomly interspersed present a different set of characters but are set in the same locale and address social and racial issues relevant to the main story. The leading characters in the dominant storyline are two of the Speaker's daughters—fifteen-year-old Madison, a daughter by the Speaker's current wife, and Lexie, an adult daughter from the Speaker's first marriage (the Speaker has been married four times)—and Mary Grace, a longtime member of the Speaker's staff dedicated to managing his office and to protecting him from the indiscretions of his personal life. The other main character is the Speaker himself, a political figure who long held hopes of winning the presidency but whose lack of discipline and machinations ultimately have thwarted his aspirations. The Speaker, unlike the other main characters, is primarily revealed by the report of those close to him, especially his daughters, his staff, his current wife, and an ex-wife.The book presents an impressive range of narrative art and skills with fiction, the most significant of which is characterization. Virtually all the leading figures in the collection, especially those in the main storyline, are troubled, flawed, and generally unsympathetic; it is a tribute to Pietrzyk's skill as an author that she not only keeps her readers fully engaged with the characters but leads her audience to care. The same can be said for the characters in the five stories unrelated to the Speaker and for the minor characters in both sets of narratives. Such skill with characterization is rare—indeed the work of “a fully developed talent.”Equally impressive and related to her success with characterization is Pietrzyk's handling of point of view. In the course of the different stories, Pietrzyk uses omniscient narration and limited first-person and third-person points of view. The omniscient narration assists readers with context and perspective; the limited first-person and third-person points of view allow readers into the minds and hearts of the narrators and require readers to draw their own conclusions about the characters, their motives, and the justification for their views and behavior.Underpinning Pietrzyk's success with characterization and skillful use of point of view is her ear for language—in her narrative presentations, with dialogues between characters, and with interior dialogues and thought processes. So attuned is Pietrzyk to the linguistic world of an angry fifteen-year-old daughter, of a disaffected adult daughter, and of a scorned ex-wife, that some readers less familiar with the book's world will occasionally struggle to decode the language while admiring its authenticity for the different generations of speakers and the particular circumstances with which they are dealing.Finally, there is a local color quality to the writing which brings readers outside of the Beltway into a world which will both fascinate and trouble them. This local color dimension extends not just to geography, landmarks, and weather but to the region's cultural and political ambience. Indeed, so essential and effective are the personal and political dimensions of the people and the place that Pietrzyk opens the book with a note assuring readers that “Names, characters, places, and incidents, are wholly fictional or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”All in all, there is in Admit This to No One a strong echo—and this is saying much—to some of the best work of Flannery O'Connor. The major characters, although not the “freaks” frequently found in O'Connor's stories, are, as I have suggested, troubled and deeply flawed. Furthermore, like so many of O'Connor's characters, Pietrzyk's characters are also seeking redemption in the form of healing and meaning in their lives. Additionally, Pietrzyk's mastery of language and setting advance both the appeal of her fiction and her thematic concerns in a manner reminiscent of O'Connor.There is also in Admit This to No One, as in much of Pietrzyk's work, a unique feminist perspective, one which manages to treat her female characters (here as elsewhere, her leading characters are overwhelmingly women) with the ultimate respect: she presents them as individuals while at the same time placing their lives in a broader social context.Finally, it is worth noting that despite its setting in the world of Washington politics, the primary focus of the eleven stories is intensely personal: the world of marriage, family, and children; and although that world is largely dysfunctional in Admit This to No One, the pain of the dysfunction and the search for meaning and healing offer hope.Leslie Pietrzyk is not just a leading Polish American author; she is an accomplished American author

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