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Synopsis
A new collection of stories from the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
Review
Aimee Bender's stories are dispatches from that slippery state between waking and dreaming. A pumpkin-headed couple births a lonely boy with the head of an iron. A motherless woman adopts seven potatoes as her surrogate children. A lonely bachelor buys himself a miniature man as a pet.
The best stories in Bender's new collection bring into full view those corner-of-the-eye visions that vanish as soon as you turn to look at them. In "Fruit and Words," a woman disappointed by love discovers a shack full of exotic fruits and words shaped out of the substances they describe — solids, liquids, and even noble gases. In this fable, as in many of Bender's best stories, the happenings are somehow deeply recognizable despite their strangeness.
But what Bender doesn't acknowledge about such half-dreams is that some of them are rubbish. The result is that Willful Creatures practices a kind of literary egalitarianism, with the best pieces suffering the company of the lesser stories. So while "Off," "Motherfucker," and "The Leading Man" open windows onto the human psyche, "Death Watch" and "The Case of the Salt & Pepper Shakers" are unremarkable.
Still, the uneven quality of work in this collection shouldn't discourage readers. With writing that is consistently exquisite, otherworldly, and bewitching, Willful Creatures promises that, once you let yourself drift off into Bender's dreamy world, you will wake afterwards to find yourself in a more magical reality. (LND)
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Synopsis
A poet and mother creates a ballad from her son's darkest days.
Review
Young Stephen Digges likes his rap music loud, his friends dangerous; when he stays out past curfew he doesn't call home with contrition on the tongue but greets his mother with a cool "Fuck you." He is picked up for guns, graffiti, and gangster marauding, and likes to kick in doors, drink, get high, and skip school. Despite his pursuit of hard-core life in 1990s suburban Boston, Stephen's hellion days have been immortalized not in lyrical swagger, aerosol strokes, or a police procedural, but in a painstakingly crafted, almost delicate chronicle by his mother, Deborah Digges. Another woman might have turned these crucible years into a self-help manual or a bildungsroman to make sense of her once-precious child's self-destructive rage. Digges, a poet and writer by trade, turns to language itself as a refuge, crafting self-reflective prose in which even the simplest statements are metrically fine: "No one will rescue us. This is the way it is: Stephen's adolescence will feel like a lifetime, his fourteenth year like ten."
Through court dates, therapy sessions (one successful bout included mother-son knife-throwing), and the dissolution of Digges' second marriage, it seems the only power the author wields over her son's fate is her power over language: her strength is drawn from flashbacks, metaphors, allusions, meditations, and frozen instants. Yet these are forces wielded from a contemplative distance. It is words, above all, that Stephen responds to least, which renders his mother even more helpless.
By the end, as Stephen is transformed from pre-teen hoodlum into aspiring young photographer, his mother describes life's transitions as the sudden and unexplainable awareness that "we've grown up, that we've escaped, somehow, that we've beat it into years in which life appears to make sense, years in which we finally, for the first time, catch up to ourselves." In this view, growing up sounds a bit like art, wherein the world is changed and re-made, in an instant that is itself years in the making. (SRP)
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