The Real Deal

I've read a lot of books and story collections, recently, that were supposedly "wildly inventive", amazing, hilarious, darkly comic, provocative, and deeply affecting. They were meant to be modern and edgy, and to have a strong feminist and sex-curious, sex-positive bent. Well, not to be negative, but what I got was mostly navel gazing and thematic retreads. Until now.

This book delivers what it promises. You can go from a laugh out loud line, to a thoughtful and touching scene, to a gut punch, in the blink of an eye. There's no point in trying to summarize the actual plots or stories for any particular entry because they'll just wither if summarized. What matters is that the stories are honest and authentic, and they excel at taking odd and unexpected paths toward some sort of insight or point.

All of the protagonists are women, and most of them are looking for something. Usually what they need to do is come to grips with some aspect of their lives. They can be bemused, confused, discontented, flinty, resigned, happy, sad, or just plain fed up. Whichever flavor they come in, our author takes them somewhere new and offers some insight, whether good, bad, or indifferent. And, even if you don't buy or embrace any particular story resolution, you are guaranteed to encounter dozens of arresting, wise, and smart observations, throwaway lines, and bits of business that will have made the journey worthwhile. This is consistently good stuff.

Be that as it may, you can look at it this way. The first story, featuring plastic Jesus and Mary, is a classic that justifies the entire book. So, once you've read that everything else is bonus content.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Fun book that reads like a series of stand up comedian views on the world. I think this is a book that Jerry Seinfeld wishes he could write.

The title story in this odd, enticing collection stands out and is Bonnaffons at her very weird best. Recommended for short story readers who are willing to accept a speculative bent to their fiction; fans of Aimee Bender will likely enjoy.

Published by Little, Brown and Co. on July 17, 2018

The Wrong Heaven is a remarkable collection of stories. In their offbeat nature and humorous takes on serious issues, the stories compare favorably to those of George Saunders and Jonathan Lethem. Amy Bonnaffons demonstrates her versatility by including a couple of stories that have a more serious tone.

In “The Wrong Heaven,” a teacher, wondering whether Jesus is on her side (the evidence suggests not) buys lawn ornaments of Jesus and Mary, plugs them in, and has a conversation. She unplugs them because she finds them to be too judgmental, but lights them up intermittently as the story proceeds. The best part of the story involves a dog who loves listening to Billie Holliday before taking a nap. The story’s moral is that, like charred marshmallows, there’s always another layer underneath, but I still like the story for the brief appearance of the canine jazz fan.

The woman in “The Other One” visits a karaoke place to sing “Hand in My Pocket” over and over, hoping to get it out of her head. The song has been plaguing her ever since she began to doubt the self-serving choices she had made about how to live her life. She hopes to purge the song, or at least to understand how her own conflicted feelings are reflected in the song’s lyrics, by making the song her own. The story is quite funny but it makes a serious point about how the mind deals with stress in ways that we don’t always understand, or tries to tell us things that we need to know.

“Horse” is the story of a woman who takes injections that turn her into a horse, but the larger theme is the longing that some women feel to live an entirely different kind of life, perhaps the kind of wild and powerful life that an unbroken horse represents. To make sure readers understand the point, the woman describes her transformation as “a cautionary tale” of “what happens when you ignore your own wildness for too long.” The woman’s transformation is juxtaposed against her roommate’s transition to motherhood. What they have in common is hope that their changed lives will be better and fear that there’s no turning back if their new lives are not what they expect.

In “Black Stones,” a dying woman explains to the angel of death the problems she has had being “the other woman.” Like all men, the angel of death has conflicting desires and isn’t good at understanding women.

The wannabe grad student who provides day care for two kids known as “The Two Cleas” sees the postmodernist irony that the people she encounters bring to their performances of life. But how will her postmodernist observations affect her own post-feminist performance of life? Will she decide that living is better than performing, or is performance and being amused by the performance of others ingrained in modern intellectual life?

The narrator of “A Room to Live In” carves two small children from balsa wood and they come to life, making her a God to the kids but not a great wife to her husband. I think the story is an allegory for parenthood. Whatever it is meant to be, the story is funny and sweet.

The characters in “Alternate” try to apply Obama’s promise of hope for the future to their own lives, only to discover that they cannot escape from the present. The narrator’s only plan is to decorate a blank wall in a way that will persuade her lover to come back. The story blends the difficulty of political and personal change in a way that is both funny and insightful.

“Goddess Night” pokes fun at women who take themselves and their worldviews much too seriously. It’s one of a couple of stories that explore sexual alternatives from the amusing perspective of a woman who considers herself clueless about what those alternatives might be. I like the advice the protagonist receives: “Just follow your desires, and you’ll live into the answers.” And I like the protagonist’s realization that women are both goddesses and mortals, “always already dying, always yet to be fully born.”

Only a couple of stories are not primarily the stuff of comedy. “Doris and Katie” is a touching story about friendship, relationships, aging, reactions to traumatic news, and the inevitability of everything coming to an end.

The most poignant story (and my favorite in the collection), “Little Sister,” is narrated by a young girl who isn’t so young by the story’s end. She copes with a dysfunctional broken family by creating a not-quite-imaginary little sister who lives under her bed, unless she’s been buried in the ground or beneath the floorboards. The story is about the ways people find to protect themselves from harm, or at least to protect an untouched image of themselves that will survive the harsh reality of life.

There isn’t a bad story in the collection, and I suspect that most readers will find one or two to be memorable. I’ve never encountered Amy Bonnaffons’ work before, but I hope to encounter her again and again.

RECOMMENDED

I loved this book so much. This is one of the best short story collections I've ever read. "The Wong Heaven" is weird and funny and moving and heartfelt. I found myself turning to it every free moment I had. It's been quite a while since a short story collection has been able to move me like this one has, and it's something I won't be forgetting anytime soon.

Bonnafons is an incredible addition to the literary world and I can't wait to see what she puts out next. I'll be eagerly waiting.

What is it like to be a woman? Is being a woman a lot like becoming a horse, being able to roam wild and free? Is being a woman tied up in other women’s curses, the sort of curse that puts Alanis Morissette’s “Hand In My Pocket” stuck on instant repeat inside your head and singing the song in a solitary karaoke bar might be the only cure for this ailment? Is being a woman tied up in the friendships one has with other women, dying to know your particular secrets? Or is being a woman about having children, but not real children — pieces of hand-carved art that comes alive in your hands? Well, in a way, I suspect that Amy Bonnaffons’ debut short story collection The Wrong Heaven could be about these things. As inventive and daring as it is for blending fabulist stories with those of kitchen sink ordinariness, it is also dark and disturbing and strange and peculiar. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of it — but that might be because I’m male and Bonnaffons writes from a female point of view.

The collection reminds me a lot of Anita Dolman’s fantastic collection of short stories released last year, Lost Enough, in that sexuality is fluid and strangeness is told from a woman’s point of view. The two authors share enough of a commonality that I’d say if you’ve read one of them, you should go out and read the other. In a sense, Bonnaffons’ collection reminds me a lot of Jonathan Lethem in all of his modes — genre-defying and literary — and it should be of no surprise that Lethem is namechecked in the Acknowledgements section of this book as someone who helped Bonnaffons as a writer along the way. What might be the collection’s strength or conversely its glaring weakness, is that these stories are not interconnected by style, though the themes of sexuality, religion and high art versus low art all play a part in these tales. And, yes, one of the stories is about a woman who can take a medicine to transform herself permanently into a horse.

Whether or not Bonnaffons is being conventional in substance or is willfully playing around with reality, there is a subversive element to these tales. As much as they’re told from the woman’s point of view in a fabulist world often populated and dominated by male writers, there is something amiss in the lives of the protagonists — there is a sense of the unfulfilled or yearning to be something else. In my favorite story of the batch, which is also the opening story and the piece that this collection takes its name from, a woman buys a lawn ornament featuring Jesus and His mother Mary, and when she plugs them in, discovers they are sentient and are as judgmental as heck. (The story ends with a bonfire and the cooking of smores, so there’s irrelevance for you since Jesus and his holy mother are involved. If I say anything more, I risk ruining the piece entirely.)

What makes the stories in The Wrong Heaven enjoyable, even the lesser ones (and being a story collection, like every other story collection, there are lesser stories) is that these are character studies. The characters grapple with their sexual orientation, of the direction their sexual relationships are headed in, the children in their care that don’t belong to them (both in reality and in the imagination), and the very nature of kitsch. Even if you feel that a piece might be a dud, and I’ll come out and say that there were just some stories that I didn’t get, there’s something salvageable within them. You may even surprise yourself by laughing out loud at some of the dialogue or pointed observations that Bonnaffons makes. There is a sense of watching a writer mature and grow with these pieces, even the ones that might seem as though they are a half-formed thought.

What might be striking to know is that there is apparently a novel in the can from Bonnaffons that’s about the afterlife, but either the author or publisher (or both) thought it was more appropriate to lead with The Wrong Heaven. This is a daring move because short story collections don’t sell as well as novels, and, more often than not, a publisher publishes the novel first and then puts out the story collection as a stop-gap measure until the author can produce Novel №2. The fact that Little, Brown and Company and Bonnaffons are leading with the story collection first is telling as to just how much confidence they have in the material. As they should. Again, The Wrong Heaven is not a perfect read, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of all of the things that Bonnaffons is interested in: gender orientation, sex, religion, nature, art, aging and more. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of shape the novel takes based on this material — just how much of it will have literary or high-brow merit, and just how much of it has elements of the fantastic or supernatural that will place it in a lower genre.

Which raises an interesting point of sorts: The Wrong Heaven is both high and low art, but the stories blur the line between the two. While some stories are more “realistic” than others, there’s something going on here where the distinctions between literary writing and pulp pieces are often one and the same. Bonnaffons is getting a lot of comparisons to George Saunders from the publisher (though to be fair to both writers, Bonnaffons doesn’t get as playful with language as Saunders has been known to do), and that’s a pretty high compliment because Saunders giftedly toys with the notion of what makes the fantastic work in literary fiction. So there’s a lot of meat to chew on with The Wrong Heaven. The reader may ask, what is this collection made of? What does it mean to write from the margins with high aspirations? What is it like to love two things at once, whether it be high versus low art or male versus female? That’s the sort of stuff this book wrestles with, and The Wrong Heaven ultimately winds up asking all of the right questions, even if the answers are still a little out of reach.

Amy Bonafons' "The Wrong Heaven" is amazing. Funny. Profound. Sad. A reader cannot help but be affected by some of these tales.