Stephen F. Austin University Press

176 pgs/$12

Reading Nicole Louise Reid’s short story collection So There! is like reuniting with someone you thought had left the planet years ago—or in this case, a host of someones: sassy, fearless girls capable of driving a semi-truck through brick with all the quiet longing stored in their hearts. This tension—between what appears and what is revealed bit-by-bit, between clauses and commas, is a rendering so masterfully drawn you find yourself reading sentences, paragraphs, entire pages three times over to see just how Reid has managed to pull it off. What you discover is a writer whose descriptive talents are reminiscent of Molly Giles and Walker Percy, one whose attention to detail is a welcome throwback in this age of contemporary fiction, where irony often replaces depth and conversations takes place in the stark white rooms of the Great Non-Place. In contrast, Reid’s characters are so entwined with their setting it’s at times impossible to tell which has more influence over the narrative: the quirky southern towns in which her characters reside, or the characters themselves. 

In “To the Surface for Air,” a mother hosting a garden party struggles to come to peace with the fact her grown son now has his own family; in “Someone Like Me,” an adult protagonist looks back on a time when she wanted acceptance so badly she ends up treating a peer with the same contempt others have shown her. What makes Reid’s characters endearing is the fact they possess a clear-eyed view of their flaws and desperation, even if they don’t know how to escape them or it. But they are good storytellers, all, talented ambassadresses into the potholes of the psyche.

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Main Street Rag

97 pgs/$9

There are few things in life, at least for me, as captivating as a puzzle. As much as my mind craves answers; answers that leave other lingering questions are the sort that I find most fascinating. I can’t stop myself from turning what I do know over and over in a vain hope that I will somehow work it all out. Though I know I might never put all the pieces into place, I am still compelled to keep puzzling. Tom Williams has created just such an enigma in the form of Douglas Myles in The Mimic’s Own Voice.

Presented as a fictional biographical pondering of a seventy-six page autobiographical manuscript in the context of imagined historical facts, The Mimic’s Own Voice tells the story of a true “mimic’s mimic” (literally), Douglas Myles. Far from being the sort who imagined fame and strained to achieve it, mimicry was just something Myles could do. “[H]is talent was equal parts a gift from a kindly deity and an accident of genetics.” In fact Myles is born well after the age of the mimic comics has passed. His career as a mimic begins because his family members have all died and he “chases away the silence by reproducing the voices of his dead relations.”

The fictional biography presented in the book is meticulous in giving life to the character of Douglas Myles. The reader is taken, beginning step by step with the early life of Myles as a “Middle West” child of “a black father and a white mother,” all the way through his rise to success and eventual fade into obscurity. Everything that could be known by a biographer about the life of Myles is presented to the reader in vivid detail, excepting, of course, what really goes on inside the mind of Myles himself.

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Simon & Schuster

$15.99/304 pgs.

The Rebel Wife, expertly written by Taylor M. Polites, is a genre-subverting novel, framed within the Southern Gothic tradition that is very much a meditation on the purposeless of death, which is immediately evident in the first sentence:

“I know that Eli is dying.”

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Numina Press

$13.95/200 pgs.

The United States of America is heavily divided, possibly more so now than anytime since the end of the civil war. Strict bipartisanism and our elected representatives’ inabilities to cross party lines is one of the major reasons why our nation continually fails to overcome the staggering social and economic issues we face today. It is as if we have all forgotten the basic skills of negotiation and compromise.

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Blue Square Press

198 pgs/$12

In Theater State, Jack Boettcher’s debut novel, published by Blue Square Press, the world has become what we wanted it to be. And yet, it isn’t exactly what we thought it would be. Although Boettcher doesn’t mention an exact year, it is clear that the novel is set in the future. A future where technology has made pretty much anything possible, the most recent development being a highway that grows and moves to adapt to the daydreams of those driving it.

Sometimes, this Megahighway swerves dangerously close to the classrooms of ‘The Academy’, an institute for highly gifted children ran by the elusive (and often holographically simulated) Principal Stone.

Janus, the narcoleptic protagonist of the story, has a special place in the ambitious plans of the Principal, who communicates with him – much to Janus’ annoyance – telepathically. Janus’ research project concerns the creation of an immortal jellyfish and holds the promise of immortality for man in the long run. This soon earns Janus a privileged status and the luxurious office that goes with it. Principal Stone, concerning himself with the breeding of a new generation of hyper-intelligent students (and not above fathering some himself) also picks him a wife.

The girl in question appears to be one of Janus’ classmates, but is in fact a hired actress ‘inserted’ among the students for unclear reasons. Things become even more confusing when this Katydid is chosen to be the ‘regional correlate’ of a pop star called Magnetic. ‘Like the mall Santa’, as Boettcher puts it, she performs in the place of Magnetic because Magnetic can’t be everywhere at once. Although, of course, it is unclear whether Magnetic is actually a person at all.

Much of the lack of tension I feel in Theater-State comes from Janus’ ambivalence towards everything around him. Things strike Janus as strange often enough. Mercenaries guarding the school, actors being hired to play students and the principal suggesting he marry one of them, South American generals hanging around the researchers’ offices. But then he sort of adapts and goes about his business.

This ambivalence, this not-taking of a moral stance, this absorbing everything with a semi-autistic indifference, coping with even the weirdest of circumstances by accepting them as inevitable, this not-rebelling against Stone or anything makes Janus a weak character and, as a consequence, severely weakens Theater-State as a whole.

Janus is not feeling crushed by some inhumane system like Winston Smith in 1984. Janus, and the other characters too, most of the time, sort of float through the universe of weirdness Boettcher created for them with relative ease.

It gets worse when Janus is forced to marry Katydid, while he is in fact in love with someone else. Here, Boettcher uses Janus’ narcolepsy:

‘He’d sleepwalked down the aisle and sleepvowed, too, Minister Stone presiding and just certified online for this one special private ceremony. ‘

That, to me, is just too easy. And it kills the suspense of the story.

On the other hand, a future where nothing much disconcerts us anymore is easy to imagine. And, to a point, you could say that this is Boettcher’s moral message: if we continue to focus on technology (and we will, most probably) and create a world where everything seems possible;  where we can’t tell whether the person we are talking to is an actual person, an actor or a hologram; where death is something that can be disputed or even eliminated, we are bound to go about shrugging our shoulders at things that, objectively speaking, should be quite shocking to us. After all, we can’t be sure if they are even real.

But the problem for the novel is quite real. Because if everything is possible, nothing is a surprise. And if none of the characters are actively fighting the system, they should be donned some other kind of conflict to justify their presence in the book.

Boettcher – much to my enjoyment, I must say – just keeps piling on the weirdness, creating a world both fascinating and deeply worrying. But at a certain point in a story, the stage-setting should be done and the conflict of the main character should kick into gear and pull the reader into the story.

In Theater-State, this point never really comes, so the book left me in a strange limbo. While it’s story and characters largely failed to grip me, the world it is set in had me fascinated.

*

~P. Jonas Bekker is a writer and a poet from the Netherlands.~

ChiZine Publications

250 pages/$21

I do not think anyone would argue that most people are not overly attracted to the unusual, the bizarre.  Freak shows would never have been so prevalent if this was not the case.  Certainly, modern views discourage this sort of curiosity.  For example, freak shows would never fly today.  People are not supposed to stare, not supposed to whisper about differences.  However, as much as people try to pretend they are politically correct, publications such as the Weekly World News are still popular.  People may not want others to know, but they are still attracted to the unusual.

Someone who just picked up Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt, only looking at the cover and knowing nothing of what was inside, might think he or she was in for that sort of freak show.  After all, some of the characters in the stories are actually bearded women.  Some are conjoined twins.  Some have lizard skin and some burst into flames without apparent physical cause.  For example, the narrator in “Bianca’s Body” has a:

second lower torso [that] grows out two inches to the left of [the narrator’s] navel.  [The narrator] calls [the second lower torso] Bianca.  [Bianca] is at a forty-five-degree angle to [the narrator’s] body and an eighty-degree angle to the ground.  When [the narrator] sits down, part of [Bianca’s] back rests on [the narrator’s] left knee and [Bianca’s] legs dangle off the ground.  Bianca has her own navel, a crotch, the necessary reproductive organs, and a nice pair of legs.  [The narrator] can move them.

And yet, anyone who picks up this book looking for a simple freak show is going to get something different than what he or she expects.

Strangely, though these characters all have elements of the freak show about them, this is not what stands out about them.  Instead, despite how unique they are, many of their problems are the same ones that most people face.  Facing unfulfilled dreams, trouble connecting with parents or children, the burdens of family, and all the such, these unusual characters are more striking for how much they are like most people than for how they are different.

For instance, returning to “Bianca’s Body,” the narrator is told that she must have Bianca “removed if [she wants] to have a child.”  However, the narrator’s husband is against this idea, at least partially because he “prefers to have sex with Bianca.”  Though this sounds like only a problem that a conjoined twin could possibly have, this is only true in the circumstances by which the problem comes about.

It is true that only a conjoined twin would have to weigh the ability to have children versus the losing his or her twin.  Also, no one but a conjoined twin would have the issue that his or her spouse wanted to have sex with the twin instead of him or her.  Still, the desire to have children is certainly not unique to conjoined twins.  Nor is weighing risks of pregnancy versus such a drive for children or experiencing sexual disassociation from a loved one.  Though the narrator’s circumstances in “Bianca’s Body” may be highly unusual, her problems, at their cores, are not all that different from what other people face.

And yet, these stories are not merely tales of ordinary lives dressed up as oddities.  Perhaps one of the reasons people are obsessed with oddities is the fact that we ignore what is familiar and pick up on what is not.  After all, we at least think we know how to deal with what we already know.  It is what we do not already know that we must carefully analyze and figure out how to deal with.

This human tendency would suggest that the bizarre aspects of the characters in the stories of Bearded Women serve a particular function, to help us to look closely.  Because the narrator in “Bianca’s Body” has a lower torso with sexual organs sticking out of her abdomen, we pay closer attention to the dilemma she faces.  Consciously or not, we analyze much more deeply than we would if the narrator had nothing odd about her.  In this way, Milbrodt is able to present us universal problems in a way that seems absolutely fresh and new.

Of course, do not think I am suggesting that these stories need to resort to tricks in order to function.  The stories are wonderful either way, but the imagination and creativity that Milbrodt brings to these characters makes their underlying stories just that much more captivating and interesting.  After all, it is the shiny object in the middle of the field that catches our eye.  In just the same way, it is the character with another person’s lower half sticking out of him or her that can really get us to think deeper about problems we might otherwise gloss over too quickly.

In any event, whether Milbrodt intends to use the unique as a glass to focus our attention on the universal, these oddities and their stories are delightful.  Far from relying on the bizarre as a crutch, the stories are compelling and well written.  Both those obsessed with the unusual as well as those who claim not to be should check out this book.  Neither will be disappointed.

*

David S. Atkinson is a Nebraska-born writer currently living in Denver.  He holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska.  His stories have appeared in (and/or are soon to be appearing in) “Gray Sparrow,” “Children Churches and Daddies,” “Split Quarterly,” “Cannoli Pie,” “C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag,” “Atticus Review,” “Brave Blue Mice,” and “Fine Lines.”  His book reviews have appeared in “Gently Read Literature,” “The Rumpus,” and “All Things Pankish.”  The web site dedicated to his writing can be found at http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.  He currently serves as a reader for “Gray Sparrow” and in his non-literary time he works as a patent attorney in Denver.

Doubleday

256 pgs, $14

Madison Spencer has it all.  Rich Hollywood A-list parents, houses all over the globe, private jets to shuttle her wherever she desires to go, all the perks of the super-elite.  There’s just one problem – she’s dead.  She’s also in Hell.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, “Damned,” we are given a guided tour of Hell.  Our tour guide, Madison, takes us along with her as she navigates the fecal seas and razorblade deserts of a uniquely twisted landscape, trying to make the most of an afterlife for which she feels woefully unprepared.

Lost, confused, and troubled after her death via a suspected marijuana overdose and her subsequent damnation, Madison looks for answers by appealing to the ultimate authority on the subject – the Prince of Darkness.  She begins each chapter of her narrative with a short note beginning with “Are you there Satan?  It’s me, Madison.”

Palahniuk’s tip of the hat to Judy Bloom is far from the only pop-culture reference in “Damned.”  Celebrities and historical figures are everywhere in this vision of the underworld.  In Palahniuk’s Hell, almost everyone on earth will find himself or herself condemned for one reason or the other.  The ridiculously strict standards for heavenly admission espoused by the most extreme fundamentalist Christians have turned out to be true.  As Madison explains;

“…”The inbred snake handlers and holy rollers had more on the ball than my secular humanist, billionaire mom and dad.  The dark forces of evil really did plant those dinosaur bones and fake fossil records to mislead mankind.  Evolution was hokum, and we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.”

Furthering the pop-cultural fixation, Madison awakens in a dismal prison cell and quickly befriends some of her fellow prisoners; Babette – the gorgeous prom queen, Leonard – the brainiac nerd, Patterson – the jock, and Archer – the blue-Mohawk adorned punk rocker.  It’s a veritable Breakfast Club in Hell.

With her entourage assembled, Madison sets out into the twisted landscape of Hell in search of the Devil himself and the answers she’s sure he possesses.  This Hell is markedly different from the landscape crafted by Dante and countless others.  Palahniuk’s Hell is not a scorched, blighted landscape of searing flame and sulfur.  Instead, it is an environment awash in bodily fluids, toenail clippings and stale candy (Hell’s sole form of currency).  This Hell is a depository of all the castoff biological matter of the living.  Every picked scab settles in Hell.  Every self-pleasure-induced ejaculation adds to the ever-growing Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm.

As Madison’s fellowship makes their way towards the center of Hell, they dodge demons and learn about the history of the various demons and explore the nature of their own damnation.  They also must deal with the eternally frustrating bureaucracy of Hell – a Kafkaesque model of malicious inefficiency and lost paperwork and their required employment.  It turns out that the majority of telemarketers and internet sex performers are actually damned souls.  It makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Throughout it all, Madison maintains a sarcastic positivity despite the circumstances.  Her snarky attitude brings to mind yet another pop-culture figure as Madison becomes a Juno-in-perdition character of sorts.  While her constant complaints about her weight or her being deprived of an adolescence coupled with her incessant declarations of her intelligence are initially grating on the reader’s nerves, Madison’s refusal to abandon all hope is infectious and you cannot help but cheer her on as she refuses to let her circumstances dictate her behavior.

“Damned” is outlandishly irreverent and tackles the themes of death and the afterlife with a flippancy that only Chuck Palahniuk commands.  Pick up a copy, you won’t be disappointed.

See you in Hell…

*

Stanton Hancock is a writer and musician whose poetry and fiction have appeared on scraps of paper, in tattered notebooks, and under bridges.  He has an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and is currently pursuing his MFA.  He recently finished his first novel and feels pretty good about that.

McSweeneys

955 pgs, $24

A Moment in the Sun is a tricky book for me to review. At 955 pages, it’s definitely the longest book I’ve read since McSweeney’s last “big book,” The Instructions by Adam Levin (which I highly recommend reading!). John Sayles has put together something spectacular here if for nothing other than the sheer scope of this turn-of-the-20^th-century epic. And in addition to everything A Moment in the Sun has to offer, perhaps the most surprising aspect of this book was how much it taught me, historically, about a time period I previously clearly knew far too little.

The book begins in 1897, shortly before the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine off the coast of Cuba, and concludes sometime after Leon Frank Czolgosz’s execution for the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. In between covers, the narrative deftly traverses locations such as the Yukon, North Carolina, Cuba, the Philippines and New York City.

And while there might be something of a conflict of etiquette here, I want to cite a passage from William Vollmann’s review for Bookforum here:

As for [the bloody coup in] Wilmington, that victory commences thus: “Now, I hear you got a few overeducated niggers up here in North Carolina . . . but if they so smart, they’ll learn to stay clear of the polling places soon enough!” A chapter relating the ethnic cleansing of the city is immensely powerful and provokes the reader’s grief and anger. Here we see the gains of the Civil War undone, and black Americans stamped back down into peonage.

I should also probably just put this out there right away: whenever I read a book that features a minority narrative complete with period dialect and was written by an affluent white person, I tend to cringe immediately and fret about the implications of cultural imperialism. Consider how insensitive Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is (despite its inexplicable popularity). When parts of Sayles’s book really zooms in on the lives of Royal Scott, his brother Jubal and the Lunceford family (e.g.), I was worried it might send the wrong message and distract from the overall narrative (I mean, honestly, we can really only stomach books like The Help once in a very long while).

However, it’s clear from how well the scenes are handled that Sayles is not simply just a better writer than Stockett (he is), he is also infinitely more skilled at balancing scene, characters, setting and the reader’s expectations. Aaron (Junior) Lunceford is easily the most eloquent speaker in the book; Royal Scott is arguably the bravest, though a case could surely be made for Junior’s younger sister, Jessie. Sayles manages, in these scenes, to make you forget about the color of these characters’ skin and truly feel for them as fellow human beings.

But why, as Rion Amilcar Scott asked me, is forgetting these characters’ color such a noble goal?

I suppose what I’m trying to get across is that Sayles has really leveled the playing field with his characters and none are really more compelling than others, i.e. he’s not doing the “white guilt” thing by short-changing Hod Brackenridge, and likewise, he’s not over-inflating the Black American characters to compensate for the poor portrayal of Black America in other period pieces. I mean, of course—just like there is actually no such thing as “always” and “never” as far as qualifiers go—the attention given to all characters isn’t split exactly in proportion—part of which, I’d argue, might come from the reader’s own background and perspective. However I’d definitely say everything might be as balanced as one could hope for in a 955-page epic.

Cultural imperialism actually seems to be met head on by the diversity of the main cast of characters. I have only so far mentioned the blacks in A Moment in the Sun, but one of the other main characters (there are three) is Diosdado Concepcíon, a Filipino insurgent preparing to fight against his country’s new colonizers (after the Spanish are unceremoniously forced to leave): the Americans. This book could easily slip into frustrating jingoist propaganda but it manages to stay neutral like Switzerland, simply observing the events and reporting on them.

I really like a particular line on the reverse cover of A Moment in the Sun: “this is a story as big as its subject: history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.” There is no room for choosing sides here. Sometimes you are possibly going to root against the Americans. Other times you will feel ashamed for things your country did in the past. But never will you lose sight of the individual plights of each character.

And I’ve barely even touched on the character of Hod Brackenridge who begins the book searching for his fortune in gold up in the Northern reaches of Canada before his poor financial situation forces him into military service that propels him across a half dozen countries over the next five years. Hod is probably the book’s central character if I was forced to pick one but he isn’t the most compelling.

My personal favorite character, however, is Big Ten, a Native American who just seems along for the ride but steals nearly every scene he’s in. A good example of this is when Lieutenant Niles Manigault charges Hod and Big Ten with disposing of the corpses of enemy soldiers:

They heave the body.

“What’s that, thirty-four?”

“I just shoot em,” says Big Ten. “Don’t ask me to keep count too.”

He used fourteen rounds in the fight, hit fourteen men. The other fellas say they just shoot into the crowd, sitting ducks, they say, but Big Ten can see what kind of weapon they’ve got and if they’re an officer or not and whether they close their eyes when they fire…

“We’re supposed to be counting.” [Hod says.]

“Make up a number. Manly Goat aint gonna climb down in here and check.”

The next one they got to toss in pieces.

“Shell must of fell right on him.” Hod is looking queasy.

“He’s not any deader than these others. Grab them feet.”

Eerily reminiscent of 21^st century America, A Moment in the Sun depicts a period in American history where extreme jingoism disguised as patriotism, an insatiable thirst for unchecked capital gain, as well as some truly horrifying racial “science” were significant factors that were weighed in foreign policy and executive decisions. Aggression masqueraded as liberation. Minority lives were considered expendable. The bottom line was all that matters. Unfortunately, it’s sad that we can’t say all of that has changed after 100 years.

In the end, A Moment in the Sun is definitely a worthy read as well as a significant reminder of where we’ve been as a nation and where we could be again some day without a fully functioning system of checks and balances within the power elite.

*

Joseph Michael Owens has written for PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review, InDigest Magazine and Grey Sparrow Journal (CELJ’s Best New Literary Journal of 2010), where he is a regular contributor to its “Man on Campus” section and an associate editor. Additionally, his short story “We Always Trust Each Other, Except for When We Don’t” was nominated for both Dzanc Books‘ Best of the Web 2011 anthology and storySouth‘s Million Writers Award. Joe lives in Omaha with five dogs and one wife.

My sister was always the one who talked about getting married, having babies. She wanted six children. That’s always what she said, and it’s always disturbed me. I thought, even when I was very young, that having so many babies would destroy the body she’d grow to have, would cost too much money, would be too much work, would colonize her entire life. It was (is) one of the pillars between the two of us. It reminded me that the very core of her conflicts with the very core of me, that we would never see eye to eye on certain things.  I wanted (want) one child, vaguely; wanted (want) to get married, vaguely, but these were anxiety-producing eventualities, not dreams. My anxiety about marriage has faded away with age, but spread to a five alarm blaze when it comes to having a child. It absolutely terrifies me. This is one of the reasons why the mothers in Paula Bomer’s Baby and Other Stories resonated with me so deeply that at times I was truly afraid, and at other times I felt relieved to the point of crying. This book made me feel so unalone.

Paula Bomer is an exceptional writer. After reading Baby, a compact collection of ten brutal, brilliantly rendered stories anchored by domestic life, I know I could read anything by her and find it compelling. She has a way of making the most mundane acts hypnotic—many of her characters carry on their seemingly ordinary lives while holding a dank disappointment inside them. Bomer does not shy away from the darker aspects of married and family life. With Baby, Bomer has pissed red wine and smeared baby shit on a Norman Rockwell. I can’t help but prefer her rendition.

In the opening story, The Mother of His Children, we meet Ted and Laura, a couple who haphazardly tripped into their marriage more than anything. The first paragraph shows us that Bomer’s eye is bare and unblinking. If you’re looking for still waters and empty pleasantries, find another book.

The car arrived and his wife held the baby on her hip and waved to him as he trotted down their steps. “Call me,” she said, and he felt he could smell her coffee mouth and sour breast milk smell as he slipped into the car. She looked old and beat-up, a bit of a double chin resting on her neck. One of her breasts was noticeably larger than the other; this had happened after the birth of their new son, Henry, when her milk came in. Their three-year-old son, Jake, bouncing around on the sidewalk screaming, “Bye-bye Daddy! Bye-Bye Daddy!” He would be gone for only two days. No matter; he was thrilled, thrilled to leave them: stinky, loud, and demanding, all of them. And he didn’t feel guilty about it. He loved his family, how they were always waiting for him to arrive in the evening. They needed him. He had framed photographs of them on his desk at work. But they were not always that pleasant to be around.

What I love most about this story, and all of the stories in Baby, is the emotional dissonance felt so deeply by her characters. That is what makes them utterly true, and ultimately compelling. Ted loves his wife, but she disgusts him. He loves his family, but he relishes being alone. They allow themselves to drift, but are filled with a vague anxiety about it. They grew eight hours apart every day. And the children. Those beautiful little devils, those terrifying lovely fiends. The children change everything, for better and worse, always simultaneously, like the sweet rot of old flowers.

In another stand-out, The Second Son, a mother struggles to love her second son equally, but her heart is swelled up, forever reserved by her first born son. In If There Were Two Boats, an older mother confronts her feelings of dislike for her adult son and new daughter-in-law, and the queasy mix of guilt and defensiveness it causes her, considering how tightly he still clings to her.

A story that particularly resonated with me was the titular tale, Baby. A woman tries to come to terms with her new life as a young mother in a big city, a life she has planned to the point of obsession, considering it a contest, and subsequently struggles with the reality of motherhood, the drudgery and the loneliness and the ever-buzzing fear. I hope, in vain, to be the inverted version of this woman—the woman who fears and avoids child-rearing but in the end, finds it joyous and fulfilling. But, as Bomer is ever ready to remind us, life is rarely how you plan it, and can change in a breath, and time will never stand still, no matter how hard you want it to.

If I had to pick, I would say that Homesick is my favorite story. It revolves around Louisa, an Austrian woman, and an American man, John, who marries her and takes her to the American Midwest, where she struggles to fit in and find happiness. Despite its brevity, the story has an epic feel, and is the only story in Bomer’s collection that has several distant locales. John’s mental illness and Louisa’s loneliness and the way their children diverge, each gravitating to one parent, is not shocking, yet fascinating. The story begins in a graduate school in Paris, which, after seeing and loving The Dreamers and Midnight in Paris, struck a deep chord within me. A place I haven’t been and want to be. I mean really, who doesn’t want to meet a beautiful woman at the Sorbonne?

Despite several stark differences between myself and these characters (namely their upper-middle-class-ness, their New York-ness, their whiteness, their heterosexuality), I could see flashes of myself in many of them. I saw me in the woman who forces her son to talk a walk with her to the neighboring graveyard in A Walk to The Cemetery—the way she emotionally ducks and parries, the way she lashes out at her son and the way it stings her immediately afterward, the way she looks at him and feels both in love and unloved, the desire to be with him there and somewhere else alone. The ending especially. But you will have to buy the book and find out how she does things to your heart. Another similarity I have with her—we never share everything.

Bomer’s desiccated prose matched with this carnival of failures and desires is a marvel to behold, and a privilege to enjoy. I applaud her literary bravery and her ability to break my heart. I hope she’ll come back soon and smash it again.

*

Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio

Akashic Books

$22.95

Tension is not usually comfortable in actual life.  In fact, most people do what they can to avoid having tension in their lives.  Strangely enough, though, tension seems generally necessary for stories to hold reader interest.  If a story has no tension for a reader then the reader may not feel compelled to keep reading.  The most compelling stories, of course, are the stories that readers cannot seem to put down – the stories that are full of tension.

Perhaps tension is just interesting.  Perhaps normally tension-averse readers find themselves unable to leave a story until vicariously produced tension is resolved, whether or not that resolution ever truly comes.  Regardless, the importance of tension for readers in stories cannot be ignored.

One way for tension to be created in stories is through conflict.  Such conflict may be within a character, between a character and the character’s environment, between different characters, and so on.  Regardless of the source of the conflict, conflict spawns tension.  Conflict means something significant is going to happen and readers better hang on to find out what.  This is certainly the case in Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez.  Boundaries has conflict in spades.

The main character, Anna Sinclair, is literally full of conflict.  For example, on a visit to the Caribbean island of her birth, her mother “shows [Anna] the lump on [her mother’s] breast and the one under [her mother’s] arm lodged in [her mother’s] lymph nodes.”  It is a cancer that Anna’s “mother has allowed…to fester and bloom.” As “her mother’s only child,” Anna feels she needs to “to stay by [her mother’s] side” as her mother undergoes chemotherapy and surgery.  However, Anna “needs to be in New York.”  “It has taken” Anna “years to climb up the ladder at…an internationally renowned publishing company where she is head of “the company’s “imprint for writers of color.”  Beyond her personal ambitions and goals, “[t]here are writers who need her.”  Anna is conflicted between her duty to her parents and her duty to her career.

Such conflict would be enough to generate tension, but Nunez does not rest there.  Even Anna’s conflicts are full of conflict.  Supporting her mother through her mother’s struggle with cancer increases Anna’s intimacy with her mother, but Anna doesn’t “know how to love her” mother.  Her mother “was not very demonstrative” and Anna never learned how to be close and express love for her mother.  Thus, even as Anna is torn between her need to be there for her parents and her need to handle her career, satisfying her duty to her parents forces her to deal with her disassociation from her mother.

Anna’s commitment to her career is charged with conflict as well.  She tries to use her position to give society what she believes it needs, “to be inspired again, to be reminded of the values that have sustained the human race over centuries.”  However, because of what books sell, Anna finds most of her work consisting of “explicit sex” and “neighborhood gangs slaughter[ing] each other with as little remorse and as much glee as if they had crushed an army of cockroaches crawling through the crevices of their filthy apartments.”  Her very commitment to her principles regularly forces her in her job to end up perpetuating the very stereotypes and mental stagnation despised by those principles.  If she quits, she would have no ability to fight for her views on literature.  If she continues, she has to do so by helping to publish the very books she is fighting so hard against.  Hence, there is conflict even inside of Anna’s conflict.

Boundaries layers Anna with conflicts inside of conflicts, inside of conflicts.  Then, Nunez carefully places Anna and her conflicts precariously in Anna’s New York/Caribbean world.  Because the balance is so delicate, friction causes heat from the slightest change and flames quickly erupt. And, luckily for the me as a reader, no world ever stays the same.  For instance, corporate shakings in the publishing company threaten to strip Anna of what progress she has made because she is a Caribbean immigrant and is perceived not to be a part of the African American struggle.  Again, conflict is pitted against conflict against conflict.  This conflict-generated tension gripped me continuously from one end of book to the other.

It is true that Anna’s conflicts, both within herself and between herself and her world, are particular.  Nunez constructs these conflicts such that they are highly personalized to Anna.  However, as I read I could see conflicts of my own embodied within Anna’s conflicts: the struggle to balance family and career, the fight between principles and means to serve those principles, and even the war between hope and accepting life’s circumstances.  I was interested and watched Anna’s battles, but those battles quickly became something much larger for me than their specific details would suggest, something universal.

Boundaries is a book that has something to say as well as a story to tell.  I, for one, would encourage other readers to listen to that something.  I certainly am happy that I did.

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David S. Atkinson is a Nebraska-born writer currently living in Denver.  He holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska.  His stories have appeared in (and/or are soon to be appearing in) “Gray Sparrow,” “Children Churches and Daddies,” “Split Quarterly,” “Cannoli Pie,” “C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag,” “Atticus Review,” “Brave Blue Mice,” and “Fine Lines.”  His book reviews have appeared in “Gently Read Literature,” “The Rumpus,” and “All Things Pankish.”  The web site dedicated to his writing can be found at http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.  He currently serves as a reader for “Gray Sparrow” and in his non-literary time he works as a patent attorney in Denver.