|
|
When an unwed
pregnant woman is pressured to get married by her boyfriend, parents, and the
entire culture around her, she sees a feverish intensity emanating from the
path to domesticity, a “paved path shaded by thick-trunked trees, lined with
trim grass and manicured mansions, where miniature houses play mailboxes and
animals play lawn ornaments and people play happiness.” Jessica Hollander’s
debut collection exposes a culture that glorifies and disparages traditional
domesticity, where people’s confusion, apathy, and anxiety about the
institutions of marriage and family often drive them to self-destruction. The
world in Hollander’s nineteen stories appears at once familiar and vividly
unsettling, with undercurrents of anger and violence attached to everyday
objects and spaces: a pink room is “a woman exploded,” home smells “of
laundered clothes and gas from the grill,” and the sun “is so bright the sky
fills with over-exposure, wilting the corners to orange, to red, to black.”
Here people adopt extreme and erratic behavior: hack at furniture, have
affairs with high school students, fantasize about sex with “monsters,” laden
flower bouquets with messages of hate; but these self-destructive acts and
fantasies feel strangely like a form of growth or enlightenment, or at least
the only form that’s available to them. As characters become girlfriends,
wives, husbands, and mothers, they struggle within their roles, either
fighting to escape them or struggling to “play” them correctly, but always
concerned with the loss of individuality, of being swallowed up by society’s
expectations and becoming “a mother” or “a wife” instead of remaining
themselves. “Hollander’s debut collection effectively fuses the common (childhood adventures, unhappy adults) with the bizarre (a grandmother obsessed with buttons, a gym full of people refusing to wear clothes) to create an intriguing volume. . . . The details in these stories ring true and are recognizable amid the insanity. A potent work from a strong new literary voice.”—Publishers Weekly starred review |
|
|
