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The Terrain between Women and Men
Women and Other Animals On the cover of Bonnie Jo Campbell's collection of stories, Women and Other Animals, there is a painting of a woman at a dinner table. Asleep on her plate is a little man with caliper-like legs; a very sharp knife is at the ready. The woman, dark-eyed, wears a knowing, slightly beleagured expression. A cat rests one paw daintily on the tablecloth. Not this meal again, the woman might be thinking. Not this paunchy, sexless morsel - not the same thing I had last night! A follower of women's fiction might have similar misgivings, being in no hurry to tuck into yet another story in which trouble between the sexes is made into something unappetizing and predictable. The reader need have no such fear in Campbell. Her men and women may not communicate terribly well or understand each other - they may not even like each other. The distance between them is so sharply mapped, however, and the prose so vivid, that the stories manage to be wise and hilarious at the same time. In "The Perfect Lawn," Kevin - a pockmarked teenage boy - hides in the shrubbery so that he can spy on his beloved at her toilette. On his belly in a pile of dried leaves, dreaming of Madeline's red cheerleader underpants, Kevin is an easy target for disdain. But Campbell makes our sympathies surprise us - we like and dislike and rediscover each of her characters by turns. "Perhaps after Kevin and Madeline had gone together awhile, her mom and his dad would start dating. It gave Kevin a moment of relief to imagine the four playing cards or eating a Thanksgiving turkey." Voyeuristic teenage lust collides with tender domestic longing in a combination as improbable as it is irresistible. Even better is "Eating Aunt Victoria," in whic Bess, a shopping mall security guard, and her brother Hal, who is starting to date men, struggle to share their house with the "aunt" their dead mother left behind. Victoria was actually their mother's lover, a miserable ocean of a woman who keeps her snacks under lock and key. Campbell's disinterested moral outlook - she has no personal agenda, leaving her free to flesh out both the good and bad parts of the people in her stories - means that the sick twinge we feel, when Bess calls Hal "screwed up" for being gay, is short-lived. It's clear that Bess fears Hal will end up alone and, as he enters a strange new life, leave her behind, too. The story explodes - literally - as the five-hundred-pound Victoria crashes through their front porch steps. Bess and Hal leave her there for a bit, cruelly dangling sweets over the hole, while Victoria bleats increasingly slurred curses from beneath the house. Because Campbell understands, and communicates fully, the mixture of loneliness and grief that causes people to fail at love, the bit of meanness in this story is at once funny and human - a moment in the lives of three people about to part, probably forever.
Joy Katz - Ruminator Review
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