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The title
of Allison Amend's first book is as dead-on as titles come.
Things That Pass for Love is not about love. It is
about romantic relationships, and it is oftentimes about sex,
but there is a great dearth of anything that could truly be
considered love. Instead, it's a collection of short stories
about missed opportunities and the things people do to feel
a connection, however fleeting.
Without
a doubt, Amend writes with the thoughtfulness and pedigree
that one expects from a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
She has a strong sense of tone—oftentimes of longing
or loneliness—and has a flair for the darkly comic à
la Flannery O'Connor. Each story reads like a variation on
a theme, as if these tales were all written to fit seamlessly
together in this book. But with this tidiness comes a surprisingly
formulaic sensibility. The selections read like a checklist
of items that might be required for a short story from a creative
writing MFA candidate. Interaction between awkward characters:
check. Strange and shocking event: check. Consistently unhappy
ending devoid of resolution: check.
Of course,
there is nothing wrong with strange stories culminating in
unhappy endings, and life rarely resolves its episodes as
cleanly as a 30-minute sitcom. Amend instead portrays these
lives as a series of vignettes, focusing less on rising and
falling action and more on how these strange bits and pieces
from the characters' lives come together to create the moments
she describes. In "Carry the Water, Hustle the Hole," for
example, Amend writes the lab journal of an "all-white Wisconsinite
lesbian biology Ph.D. student" at Stanford. Her lab experiments
involve surgically altering mice to make them forget how to
run their mazes. But as the mice lose their memories, so too
does the woman, to the point where she only vaguely recalls
that she's cheating on her girlfriend with a man. One also
gets the sense that when the mice develop suicidal tendencies,
so too does she, but the promise of parallelism falls short
in the end.
The reliance
on strange, shocking elements also becomes more ineffective
the further one reads into the book, coming off as gimmicky
and crutch-like. Instead, Amend writes best when her stories
feature offbeat rather than startling details. In "The People
You Know Best," for example, a cyberotica writer named Marca
has difficulty meeting men, and she discovers that a potential
suitor is actually in love with her dog—who reciprocates
his feelings. Though the premise is the launching pad for
the story, the plot focuses not on the man and her dog but
on her feelings of confusion and loneliness, as well as the
effects of writing erotica on her outlook. The story is interspersed
with bits from Marca's cyberotica, and she even accidentally
calls the potential suitor her boyfriend because she has conjured
in her own mind an idea of a life spent with him. Unlike many
of the other characters in Amend's stories, Marca is not detached
and shrinking away from others; she's searching for connections
and hitting brick walls. The emotional journey that Marca
takes in this story may not end on a high note, but it feels
real because there is nothing shocking; it's odd, but it's
plausible.
A fixation
on animals isn't the only motif repeated in the book. Amend
often borrows images and ideas from her other stories: cheating
lesbians, golf, dysfunctional families, loveless marriage.
Oddly, she often seems hung up on race. In "A Personal Matter,"
a middle-aged white man discovers that he has an illegitimate
son with an Afro-Caribbean woman and contemplates how he must
look walking around a pumpkin patch with a black toddler.
In "Dominion Over Every Erring Thing," a teacher converting
to Judaism is tormented for her "white pussy" and "honky ass"
by a young boy in her inner city classroom while illegal immigrants
from Latin America fall to their deaths out of airplanes.
One gets
the sense that Amend is mulling over the consequences of white
liberal guilt and how acting upon it seems to backfire. However,
her meaning becomes a bit dubious in "Bluegrass Banjo," in
which an adopted boy from Ecuador—the only person whose
ethnicity is mentioned in the story—is described as a
problem child who eventually brags about choking a little
girl with her own braids. The visual of the savage boy strangling
Pollyanna begs the question of Amend's intent: Why are all
her minorities described as violent, exotic, or uncouth?
Perhaps
the answer goes back to her need to shock readers. Perhaps
she wants her readers to wonder if a white author from the
Midwest would really write stories in which illegal aliens
fall from the sky and an adopted boy from Ecuador brutally
murders a little white girl. But considering the rate at which
she tries to startle her readers, she ends up desensitizing
them both to the strangeness and to the loveliness of her
writing style. Shock for the sake of shock means little, and
once readers have come to recognize her patterns it becomes
the exact opposite of shocking: predictable.
(December,
2008)
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