The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories
by Aimee Bender
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Book Summary Information
Author: Aimee BenderEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-08-17
ISBN: 0385492162
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories
Book Review: Aimee Bender, Telling Terrible Tall Tales
Summary: 1 Stars
From reading all the previous praise of this book one would get the impression that Aimee Bender is on par with Mother Goose. This praise is gratuitous at best. In every story, Bender consistantly breaks the number one rule of good fiction, the "show, don't tell rule". Here are some excerpts from GIRL IN A FLAMMABLE SKIRT as examples. In fact, I'm going to open the book at random to find examples: (1) from "Legacy": "On the set of her fifth movie, the starlet was sitting at her makeup table feeling inestimably sad. I have beauty and fame and riches and boyfriends she thought, and yet I am so unhappy." (2) from "The Ring": [a girl is saying "yes" to a marraige proposal from a cohort, while they're robbing a house] "And right there in the stranger's kitchen I said yes to that robber and both of our eyes filled with tears at the rightness of it all. Shutting the front door quietly behind us, we walked hand in hand to the car; when he said we were far enough away, I let out a shout of joy."
And these are just two random examples! There are many more.
Bender's prose is so sparse that emotion fails to exist in her stories. Instead, Bender needs to rely on telling the reader what emotions are happening instead of showing them. Unlike Hemingway, Bender's sparse prose doesn't work. There are not enough words to hold up the feelings Bender is trying to get through.
The symbolism Bender uses in many of her stories is interesting, but without craft, the symbolism becomes nothing more than a gimmick. Yes, it's interesting to think of the symbolism and what it all means, but if there is no emotion conveyed through the writing then who cares? The characters are two-dimensional, the plots are weak, and if the stories themselves are held together by only symbolism, then what's the point?
People have praised these stories for their fairy-tale quality and their fantastic imagery. I think the only fantastic thing that has happened here is that Aimee Bender has become so popular. (Just what were all those journal editors thinking?)Bender's picture on page two of the paperback edition is the best thing about this book. Hopefully, this California writer can step it up in her next collection.
Summary of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories
A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending.
Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.
In conventional fiction, war heroes return home minus an arm or a leg--or, to take Hemingway's worst-case scenario, the family jewels. In Aimee Bender's deeply unconventional collection, however, an even more suggestive body part goes AWOL: "Steve returned from the war without his lips." The army doctors have temporarily replaced them with a plastic disc, which impairs his speech. Luckily, this doesn't prevent him and his wife from engaging in some slightly surrealistic sexual maneuvers: "That night in bed, he grazed the disc over her raised nipples like a UFO and the plastic was cool on her skin. It felt like they were in college and toying with desk items as sexual objects."
That same combo--sex and off-kilter surrealism--provides Bender with her modus operandi. In "Call My Name," for example, a young heiress tails a stranger back to his apartment, gets her dress sliced off, and then consents to be trussed to a chair while he watches a TV documentary about Mozart. "Quiet Please" features a libidinous librarian who takes on all, uh, comers in the back room. Bender isn't, it should be said, simply a purveyor of French postcards. Her prose is exquisitely shaped, and its singsong rhythms suggest something out of a wised-up, whacked-out fairy tale. Indeed, if the Brothers Grimm had been a little more attuned to the pleasure principle, their fables might have boasted at least a family resemblance to Aimee Bender's. --James Marcus
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