$16.07
ISBN 0814799051
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Susannah Indigo
(09/11/02)
Perspective is everything -- in life, in lust, in good writing, in art, in tragedy. The cover of The New Yorker last year was highly dramatic, black on black, and you could only see the outline of the towers if you looked in just the right light. Now a year later, here is the same artist, Art Spiegelman, with the cover of 110 Stories displaying his original idea for that cover, full of light and sky with the towers only draped in black, Christo-style. He didn't use this cover last year after he created it, he says, because "surrealism was inadequate to that moment, and the vividness of the color seemed to obscenely mock the blackness at the heart of the picture."
This year it is a perfect remembrance, as are so many of these stories. The editor asked 110 New York writers to do what might be the ultimate challenge in a writing exercise -- "give me less than 3 pages about 9/11, and make it different." How do you write about such a bizarre, shocking moment in history with any kind of perspective? The media certainly has it all down factually, ad infinitum, until you're sure there's nothing more you want to know. But the best of these pieces by novelists and poets write about it the way that all great writing happens -- they come at it sideways, or with complete indirection, sometimes in metaphor, and write about love, selfishness, lust, dieting, the lives of the rain, and in one case, from the perspective of a rat in the sewer below the towers.
In a story about a married Arab woman with a lover, the woman rises a week after 9/11, envisioning images of all the beaches she has ever known to get her day started in some right way -- aquamarine sea, limestone villas, sand the color of caramel custard -- then gathers up her ID card, removes the stud from her nose, and heads toward a mosque to pray, while wondering mostly why her lover hasn't called her. The car stops at a red light. She cannot believe that the man who fucked her seven days ago hasn't bothered to e-mail, to call; she cannot believe she is thinking of him still and that she has thought more about him than at any other time, in any other year. She cannot believe she is becoming this sort of woman, the sort of woman who baffles her. At the mosque there are no other women praying, and she feels stripped to the bone shameless; adulteress; wine-drinker. Her jeans seem to say this to the men as do her boots and the fact that she is here alone on a day when the women are secure at home.
Jennifer Belle's Weight Watchers story is by far the most memorable of the collection, because she captures humorously the shock of the moment, the sudden change in ordinary lives. The esteemed long-time leader of the group, a seventy year old woman who has replaced her dinner dishes at home with smaller salad plates so that portions will look bigger, tells everyone to just go eat. An ice cream is just an ice cream, and a cake is just a cake, and a hamburger is just a hamburger...what's wrong with eating? If you come to my house right now you'll find every kind of ice cream and cookie there is. The narrator, a long-time dieter, is shocked and delighted, envisioning a new world where eating to make yourself feel better is understandable. But by the next week the leader has recovered, and although all members have gained weight, there is no mercy. "Think of all the people who died in the towers who were on Weight Watchers, working hard to follow the plan," Estelle said. I imagined a secretary whose last meal was a Just 2 Points Bar. "They would have wanted us to stay on the program.... Do it for them."
It's almost impossible to be funny about a tragedy of this scope, and humor with some meaning to it is close to none -- this may be the only other piece I've read besides the outstanding piece from The Onion last year, God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule that succeeds.
Jonathan Ames writes about sex and lust in perhaps the most indirect tale, a piece that I notice some Amazon readers have criticized as not belonging in a book like this. It's an excellent story, set at the southern girls college where he is the new "writer in residence" when everything happens, rather than being in New York, and he's busy lusting after beautiful girls, safely in his "womb shelter." Yesterday I was watching the girls play tennis. I was trying to catch glimpses of panties beneath the little skirts. Meanwhile bombs were being dropped in Afghanistan. But the girls were still trying. Serving, running, volleying. Bending over. Yeah. Bend over....
It's unfortunate that the book is arranged alphabetically by author, because the end of Ames story would have made an excellent ending to the book:
I'm so horny because I'm Jewish. Jews know their life is in danger all the time, that's why we're so horny. It's distasteful. We're about to get it in the neck again, I'm sure. I think Jews must have alien blood in them. Some alien screwed a sexy Jewess in the desert five thousand years ago. That's why we're hated. How else do you explain Einstein, Freud, Gershwin, and Lewinsky? If Lewinsky hadn't been so horny and brainy, she never could have sucked Clinton's cock...She's the Einstein of sex. And if he hadn't been dealing with his blow-job impeachment, maybe he could have done something in the Middle East and we wouldn't be going crazy right now, bombing and getting bombed...it's all too much for me. So I'm going to the dining hall where I'll be surrounded by 600 real vaginas. Not imaginary. Real. Delicious. Beautiful. All being sat on while the girls eat. Incredible. I'm in a womb shelter. Bring on the bombs.
