When she read the always dire news in the morning—the wars being fought, instigated or supported virtually everywhere in the world, the collapse of civil liberties, the income inequality between the rich and not-rich, the struggles of the hungry, the sick, the unemployed and uninsured, the irreversible consolidation of power by the powerful, the silencing of dissent by those still intelligent and courageous enough to dissent—she felt as if she were living in the midst of an aggressive mass of malignant cancer cells and that this uncompromising, self-justifying, take—all-at-any-cost cancer was not her country just because she happened to be living in it but something outside and beyond her, a foreign body, because she saw it plainly as the main threat to the health and life of the world. What shocked and shook her was realizing that she couldn't help feeling that anything awful that happened to this cancer would be perfectly justified, that any attack would be an autoimmune response from the world as a whole, defending itself from the virulent and unappeasably voracious disease that her homeland had become somewhere along the way. This realization had come upon her slowly and stealthily and now, although she was directly responsible for none of the crimes the country she lived in was perpetrating, she found herself acknowledging that she couldn't in good conscience object if she was annihilated in the midst of the flames of whatever horrible disaster it's enemies were contemplating by way of self-protective retribution. She might be collateral damage in terms of the harsh chemotherapy to come but she'd become, undeniably, inextricable from the cancer in which she lived nonetheless. (The Passive Terrorist, Elizabeth Szabo Birch)
This is the kind of dark thinking that you won't find in The Color Master, a collection of short stories by Aimee Bender. What you do find are slice-of-life tales with a sprinkling of magic dust. Minor disturbances and fleeting uneasinesses are resolved or, at least, dissipated in the general feel good atmosphere evoked by each story's conclusion. I suppose that after the high seriousness of books by William Gass and Danilo Kis I was susceptible to be let-down by any book that followed and the staunchly middlebrow writing of Aimee Bender did just that.
It was by no means a bad collection of stories, but it's the kind of stuff that suffers by comparison to great literature; this book doesn't challenge or stretch anyone's horizons very far or by too much. It's a fiction that seeks to capture the elusive fairytale quality we sometimes glimpse in the midst of ordinary moments and everyday life. There's nothing wrong with that; in fact there's everything right with it.
I guess what I object to—and miss—is the palpable absence of real darkness in these stories which would have given them a much-needed weight and gravitas. This is, after all, a dark world and it's getting darker as the days go on. Perhaps Aimee Bender thinks it better to light a candle than curse the darkness? I think you need to do both.
Here are brief plot descriptions of the stories collected in The Color Master:
No comments:
Post a Comment