What's that? I couldn't hear you over my autographed book...

I tapped her on the shoulder and burbled something about signing my book, as I struggled to free it from my bag. She asked my name and I guess I said Caroline. Her friend complimented me on my toenail polish, to which I replied "Yeeeaaaahhhhh" and wiggled my foot at him. Then she said "Bye Caroline!" and I just stood there, my mouth opening and closing like a guppy, as she shimmered into the night.

This cake is for ME!

This Cake is For the Party by Sarah Selecky

This Cake is for the Party by Sarah Selecky is the literary equivalent of sitting around the dinner table in silence while your Aunt makes passive aggressive comments about your Uncle's "erectile deficiencies", and his insistence that everything would be fine if your Aunt "put a little effort into her saddlebags." And you're loving it!

Speaking of love, I love short stories! Their format always seem to make a hell of a lot more sense than novels. Real life is far more episodic; for example, do you remember what happened to you last Tuesday? Of course you don't because you were probably alone on the couch eating Corn Pops for dinner, wondering where your dog is. Memory is shaped by events, not by the repetition of day to day life. Short stories fundamentally function according to this law and therefore, are better suited to represent the way life works. Some people say: "But, y'know, I need to get into a story..." Fair enough, but just realize that novels are much more likely to hold your hand though the narrative while short stories just throw ideas in your face and leave you to clean it up. How do you like to read?

In her stories, Selecky takes a hard look at the problems with turning thirty. Stuff like infertility, adultery and having your drunk ex-boyfriend show up at your house in the middle of a dinner party, and, as a real gear-grinder, everyone being happy to see him. Everyone says your thirties are the time when you are really living; for some reason you are supposed to be earning lots of money, guffawing with your chums at the bar after work and damn sure of "who you are". Selecky's characters apparently missed the boat. Her stories, instead, are full of intensely real people who have problems that elude clear definition. One of the characters in "How Healthy Are You?", has to deal with two opposing facts:

1. Her husband is a health freak who looks down his nose at people who aren't health freaks.
2. Due to a cash flow problem, she was once forced to volunteer for an illegal experiment where she had to live in confinement and pop pills for a week just to pay the rent.

She is unable to reveal her true self to him, the person she was before he became a part of her life and molded her into his image. While this scenario may seem far-fetched, it explores who we are before relationships come to regulate how we behave. Were you the same person with one partner as you were with another? Of course not! With one, you were probably into reading each other to sleep in bed and with the other, you enjoyed going to the local bar to slam some beers and make out in the corner. But Selecky carefully nuances her work, bestowing her characters with the gift of absurdity. It's who we were, who we are and who we could become.

Food is another connecting theme and the characters are continually using it to normalize awkward situations, clinging to the ritual of eating as a way to mask the tensions that ripple through the text. In "Go-Manchura", the main character attempts to solicit her friends into a bizarre pyramid scheme of health food products, inviting them to her cottage to try to sell them on the idea of the Manchura nutritional line of food. Of the few friends that do show up, it becomes quite clear that they are more concerned with the free accommodation than with the food. Here, the health food that claims to "start an avalanche of abundance in so many other parts of your life," only serves to complicate the relationship between the protagonist and her friends, until eventually, you are writhing in your seat like your watching a comedian bomb on-stage. All her stories speak directly to a generation of people coming to terms with the realization that their thirties are not working out as promised. Her writing states little and implies much, a sign of a genius at work.

This Cake is For the Party is an ode to awkwardness. In other words, while everyone else sits around the proverbial dinner table in horrified silence, trying desperately to change the subject/disappear/kill themselves, Sarah Selecky is taking notes under the table. Because she knows that this is the stuff great stories are made of.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is the literary equivalent of having a gigantic fudge cake set down in front of you, but you know that whoever made it spit in the batter. But here’s the thing: I’d still eat it.

I had actually heard of the movie before I knew of the book and from what I heard, the movie was very good. Naturally, then, you could assume that the book is better because everyone knows the book is always better than the movie. The book begins innocently enough, with students from Hailsham, a private boarding school in England, going about their idyllic daily lives. Slowly, Ishiguro drops hints that the situation at Hailsham doesn’t add up: teachers lurking about the halls, the distinct lack of parental involvement, the abnormal emphasis on creative output from students. By the end of part one, you become aware that the students are not so much being raised, as they are cultivated for their healthy vital organs. Ishiguro opens up a big can of worms here, delving into the ethics of scientific progression, cloning and sacrificing one human life for another. The reader walks side-by-side Kathy and the other students as they slowly become aware of their purpose. Each chapter ending seduces the reader with another salacious clue, coaxing you to read just one more. In this way, Ishiguro successfully positions the reader to experience the same confusion, the same realizations and the same hope that their “lives” could be spared.

And then…nothing.

Kathy and Tommy’s theories hit a brick wall. There is no escape, no deferral of their scientific role and no purpose to their artwork from Hailsham. The book is either a thorough study in tragedy or a sloppy ending to a book that forced the reader to become so invested on the final outcome that they are willing to overlook the simplistic narrative. This can be taken further: are we as readers conditioned to expect the worst, the most complex, the most uphill-iness of battles? Perhaps less and less readers expect a clean ending to a story, or more specifically, a clean ending to a concept or theory introduced in the beginning. Books that question generally do better than books that answer. While there seems to be a move away from these conventional narrative rhythms, Ishiguro employs them so heavily in this book, it proves to be incongruous to the style he sets for himself. The subject matter is another area of concern. Ishiguro illuminates the complexities of scientific and human ethics, all of which could be shattered into a million seeds for thought. Yet he ends up denying the birth of almost every single one of these ideas, leaving them to gestate then, eventually, flatline.

I have an undeniable urge to call this book “Dystopian Lite”. And I just did. If you appreciate the “whimper” over the “bang”, this book’s for you. It’s definitely enjoyable over all, but the unmistakable flavor of let-down lurks in the bottom of the pan.