rev. of Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner

Large Animals in Everyday Life
 Stories by Wendy Brenner. Univ. of Georgia Press, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron.

Wendy Brenner's stunning first collection of stories, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, is marked by her dark humor, deft stylistic range, and joyous use of language. Whether an ice cream salesgirl in a bear costume at a Florida supermarket, or the bitter paramour of a two-bit country singer in Nashville, Brenner's characters are indeed like large animals in everyday life -- awkward, out of place, and destined for a kind of extinction. Her prose is always evocative and rhythmic, and her vision is an almost impossible skew between nihilism and purposefully naïve optimism, as if her characters are willing to turn a blind eye to what they have taken so much trouble to learn.

In the opening story, "The Round Bar," the narrator is a woman who has wandered unhappily from California to Florida, only to stumble onto "a dwarfish Kentucky native" with a "baby-smelling beard" who plays guitar and sings at a rotating bar. "His stomach is hard and creates a certain space between us," she says. "His small legs in their Wranglers seem far, far away. . . . His dick is small and in the morning when he's gone nothing's sore and nothing smells." Even though the singer is married, the narrator desperately trails him back to Nashville and holes up in a room at the Sheraton, where she keeps company with an odd pre-adolescent girl -- she has polyps, and she and her family are in town to tend to an aunt with "a tilted uterus." Yet when the woman finally sees the singer again, she is disappointed: "He steps inside, a short fat man in a tractor cap, and sits at the table, a stranger."

"The Child" chronicles the difficult familial relationships surrounding a little girl who is "scared of everything." The child has "a blasé grandmother and a passionate grandmother," and their central disagreement concerns whether the child is actually ill. "She just has a fast metabolism," the blasé grandmother argues. "Metabolism, my God!" thinks the passionate grandmother. "The child was digesting herself out of existence, evaporating by invisible increments every minute, even now, right here in front of them!" For Christmas the child's father furtively builds her a dollhouse, while "the mother takes the child to see a behavior specialist to get her out of the way." But, ultimately, it's not the child who will be consumed, but the passionate grandmother, who succumbs to an illness she has tried so hard to keep secret.

A wonderful, frontal, in-your-face irony runs through these stories, the effect of fearless writing that is intelligent and honest and generous. In "A Little Something," Helene "knows she is not necessarily a pretty person . . . Her parents were clever agnostics who didn't believe in sadness or the unknown." Her unsatisfying relationship with Joe, whom she meets at a cocktail lounge while waiting out a blizzard, almost inexplicably develops into a consideration of living together, even though Helene is "smart enough to know about things like taking charge, responsibility, Oprah Winfrey, about independence being the redemption of the modern woman." Perhaps she is attracted to Joe because he avoids pain of any sort, "Joe, who once stood on the roof of the Sears Tower wearing only a loincloth, and another time served paella to Natalie Wood. When you let go, life is one fabulous day at a time."

As the title of the collection indicates, animals figure prominently in these stories, and it's tempting to see them as symbolic -- frozen "on the center line" of the highway, finding it "impossible . . . to go forward and impossible to go back." Katie, in "I Am the Bear," dresses up as a polar bear to dish ice cream cones at the local supermarket, until she is fired due to the complaint of a teen model seeking vengeance for kissing what she'd been duped into believing was a
male bear. "I was a beast, yes," Katie confesses, "but I also had something like x-ray vision; I was able, as a bear, to see through beauty and ugliness to the true, desperate and disillusioned hearts of all men." While even oysters and insects sing in Brenner's fiction, her people and her language sing louder, in rich voices filled with wisdom and awe.

Fred Leebron's first novel, Out West,
will be published by Doubleday in November, and he is co-editor of the forthcoming Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.