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The Body Parts Shop
Lynda Schor
FC2
ISBN Number: 1573661201
The Garden in Which I Walk
Karen Brennan
FC2
ISBN Number: 1573661163
Review by Nathan Leslie
Fiction Collective Two (FC2) is not your father’s publishing company. As their mission statement declares, since 1974 FC2 has endeavored to publish fiction “considered by American’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu." FC2 is a “not-for-profit" publishing house with a generous helping of ’tude, a press with a sense that their mission on earth is to right the wrongs made (over and over and over) by the bottom-line New York publishers.
I could sit here at my keyboard and take a distant/journalistic stance on this tête-à-tête. I could weigh this issue of small presses rebelling against the corporate powers-that-be with even hands and a dispassionate disposition. But as an author who has been (1) thus far, shut out of the New York publishing world and (2) embraced by the small press world, my gut-level reaction to FC2’s brazenness and call to arms is something like this: “Hear, hear." Or maybe: “Stick it to them." Or yet again: “Hip-hip hooray."
Recently FC2, per usual, published two mesmerizing collections of short fiction—The Body Parts Shop by Lynda Schor and The Garden in Which I Walk by Karen Brennan. Even though FC2 gravitates toward fiction that at least nudges up against the “experimental," FC2 couldn’t have published two less similar works of fiction if they had tried. Then again, such diversity is a sign of a healthy press, unafraid of risk, unwilling to kowtow to “the market."
The Body Parts Shop is a true reading experience, reminiscent of one of my many “lightbulb moments" as an undergraduate reading Donald Barthleme’s 40 Stories. Schor’s stories are not nearly as meta-fictional as Barthleme’s, but like Barthleme Schor crafts her fiction as conscious art rather than mere fiction. For starters, Schor has constructed the stories in The Body Parts Shop using historical tidbits, pictures, graphs, modular titles, and especially lists—plenty of lists. The stories in The Body Parts Shop are not written in a documentary style; these stories don't attempt to capture the grist of life. Rather, in many of the best stories within The Body Parts Shop, Schor riffs on theme—she uses a motif to create a narrative-organizing principle rather than the other way around.
Though The Body Parts Shop does not pursue a completely comprehensive thematic orientation, it comes close. Certainly two of the best stories in this collection focus specifically on the theme of the body (“Lips" and “The History of My Breasts"). Other stories within the collection are either tightly focused on issues surrounding the body and body parts (“The Scalp Agency," “Marital Bliss," “Interviewing Barbie") or at least have a kissing-cousin relationship with the subject (“The Exercise Machine," “Still the Top Banana," “Coming of Age"). The Body Parts Shop at least approximates a loose thesis, combining a bundle of ideas in narrative form: here the body is something close to destiny; Schor implies the body has been manipulated by the media and companies so that men, and particularly women, have become subjected to macro forces beyond their control. Likewise, at least in my reading of Schor’s collection, human understanding of the body in the 21st Century has also become wrapped-up in personal politics, especially (as in “Coming of Age," where a mother disapproves of her nihilistic, prostitute daughter’s treatment of her own body) in the way in which generational differences establish varying attitudes toward the body.
Still, as much as this collection proposes compelling politics, The Body Parts Shop is first and foremost a collection of stories, of narratives—and good ones at that. The story “Lips" isn’t a contemporary classic simply as a result of thematic coherency alone, but rather in the manner in which the story establishes the individual narrator’s very individual struggle with her own lips. Pursuing the idea that lips have become an item of sexual focus as a result of Max Factor and the makeup industry in general, “Lips" offers the story of a woman’s life through a narrow focus on this one very particular (and often overlooked) body part. The narrator reflects upon the way lipstick made her feel (sexy); she recalls make-out sessions with Darrell as a teenager, as well as finding lipstick prints upon the “curly collar of my father’s white shirt with the thin, green stripes." Both God and the devil are in the details. As a result, “Lips" builds to a real sense of pathos. The parallel story, “The History of My Breasts," is just as effective. Different body part, same magnificent approach.
Some of the stories not as directly about body parts in this collection are just as strong—if not even stronger—than “Lips" and “The History of My Breasts." “Still the Top Banana"—a story about Cheetah, an ex-movie-star/celebrity chimp—stuck with me, in a way that several of the human stories later in the collection didn’t. Again, showing her penchant for the story-as-mini-novel, Schor’s “Still the Top Banana" investigates the life of an animal that, as Nietzsche would have it, is all too human. Cheetah finds himself used and abused by the very people who claim to look out for him—his trainer Tony Gentry, for starters. Likewise, I found myself entranced by “Interviewing Barbie." Told through the point of view of a feminist reporter initially resistant to the idea of interviewing Barbie (yes, Barbie takes on her own ditzy persona here), the story increasingly explores the contradictions inherent in the reporter’s relationship with the doll. Barbie may be a bubblehead, but she is just as entrapped as the next gal.
In a sense, the further away from run-of-the-mill realism Schor strays, the better her work becomes. Imbued with both metafictional and stream-of-consciousness aesthetics, the final story in Body Parts Shop, “The Exercise Machine," is a tour de force. The story is essentially plotless, but the insights and observations into contemporary life crackle with verve and originality. On the other hand, “The Apartment" (which details a tale of a man in Manhattan cynically trying to acquire the apartment of a dying woman) and “Collateral Damage" (in which a pizza store owner suffers after two of his teenage employees go on a Columbine-style shooting spree) feel as if they should be included in another, less free-wheeling collection. These realistic stories didn’t resonate nearly as much with me as the more obsessive stories.
In the end though, Schor’s fiction glows with innovation. Towards the end of the collection, her story “Marital Bliss" begins with this sentence: “The sensuous couple perform genital ablutions, as they are supposed to, three times a day, in spite of their hectic schedules (two kids, two jobs a piece)." Schor does not shy away from frank sexual descriptions or biting satire. Instead, in this send-up of a story, she documents the implosion of a couple, how the intimacy they strive for is ironically leached from them by hogwash such as Dr. Brothers’ First Eleven Rules for Success. Schor’s Body Parts Shop is a bracing fiction.
Like Lynda Schor, Karen Brennan—who won the AWP award in 1991 with her collection of stories Wild Desire and published a memoir, 2002’s Being with Rachel (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize)—also experiments with structure, and also writes with a feminist eye towards the inner lives of women. The similarities, to my mind, stop there. Unlike Body Parts Shop, Brennan’s The Garden in Which I Walk is mostly geared towards the visual/poetic image. Her fiction is layered with the language experiments that Shor’s more detached voice is not. The Garden in Which I Walk contains many wonderful and poetically written stories, but this is a collection, unfortunately, also marred by several stories that don’t quite fulfill their potential.
In general, the stories from Brennan’s latest book gravitate toward flash fiction (or at least fiction on the condensed side of the ticket): ten of the fourteen stories run under ten pages. The collection is a mixed bag: stories such as the Gertrude Stein-esque title story—in which every sentence begins with either “There Is" or “There Are"—are compelling, creepy, haunting. Two of the most memorable stories in the collection revolve around unhappy housewives. In “Saw," Fran, a beautiful woman, falls in love with the man who cuts down her tamarisk tree. Fran is anguished and Brennan develops her protagonist’s inner life expertly. The story ends on a mysterious note, keen to both image and the unknown qualities of human bonding.
Perhaps the most honest story in the collection, “Island Time," details a young marriage on the rocks. Set in an unnamed Carribean island, this story painfully uncovers the narrator’s inner revelations: among them, that she married too young, too soon, that she didn’t think her decisions through to their natural consequences. As the author makes clear, the protagonist is a contemporary Madame Bovary.
Brennan seems to have an innovative penchant for juggling more than one protagonist in the same story. In “Secret Encounters"—one of her best experiments with this technique— Brennan relates the lives, thoughts, and disappointments of a woman who got a facelift, a woman who is undergoing sleep therapy, and a man who is attempting to renovate his house. What the story achieves is a kind of connection between these three distinct lives, not to mention exhibiting the constant American need to reshape and improve. Brennan’s juggling technique also works beautifully with her story “Paradise," which relates a series of tormented passengers the narrator sat next to on various airplanes.
On a thematic level, Brennan’s work is most notable for its examination of the roles of women in contemporary society. In “The Emergence of Modernism" Brennan writes: “I was born with a birthmark on my chin. Not a strawberry or a mole, but a minute hill where an indentation should have been. It was as if a pea had been slipped beneath my dermis and I think it cast a tiny shadow. My father hated the birthmark …." This is birthmark removal as symbolism: the narrator’s obsession with her birthmark is only a reflection of her father’s patriarchal grip upon “the flaw emanated from his DNA." It’s a fascinating and disturbing little story.
Still, Karen Brennan’s The Garden in Which I Walk is, at times, limited by the author’s fictional tics, techniques which, at times, compress the voice of her narrators to a kind of sameness. While many of the very short, vignette-like flash fiction pieces in this collection succeed on the strength of imagery and gorgeous language, characterization is not the long suit of this collection. Instead of psychology, Brennan often effectively substitutes mood and literary allusion and/or metafictional musings. However, the problem with stories like “The Woman who Loved Petunias," “Tutti Frutti," and “Happy Girl" is that they overuse the very strategies that make many of Brennan’s best stories so rich. Experimentation, yes. Sameness, no. Delving into the expressive power of language, yes. Too many self-conscious references to Heidegger and Flaubert and Joyce, no. There is a fine line between metafiction and academic didacticism, and occasionally Brennan crosses into the latter.
In a time of continued publishing mega-mergers, FC2 is clearly a publisher worth supporting. The stories in both The Garden in Which I Walk and Body Parts Shop are unique and gripping. These stories push the envelope and are likewise rife with vital insights regarding our society. FC2’s mission statement rings true: heterodox, innovative, challenging. Indeed.
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