|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2007 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
No One
Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Extremes The sixteen
stories in Miranda July’s debut collection titled, No One
Belongs Here More Than You, share a common trait. Each protagonist leaps
to the extreme in a quest to be loved and accepted. The conversational prose
and quirky storytelling present a unique voice. Here’s an excerpt, all of the
story titled, “It Was Romance,” pp. 57-62: This is how we are different from other
animals, she
said. But keep your eyes open so you
can see the cloth. We all had white cloth napkins over our faces, and the
light glowed through them. It seemed brighter under there, as if the cloth
actually filtered out the darkness that was in the rest of the room—the dark
rays that come off things and people. The instructor walked around as she
talked so that she was everywhere at once. Her face and permed hair were
forgotten; there was just the voice and the white light, and these two things
combined felt like the truth. You will never be a
part of the world. She was standing quite near. Humans make their own worlds in the small area
in front of their face. Now she was across the room. Why do you think we are
the only animal that kisses? She was near again. Because the area in front of our faces is our
most intimate zone. She drew a breath. This
is why humans are the only romantic animal! We were
quiet and wondering under our napkins. How did she know this? What about
dogs? Don’t dogs feel everything we do times one hundred? But we couldn’t
see to form a chain of doubt between each other’s eyes. And her voice had a
vibrant certainty that made believing her feel liberating and obvious. Why
pull your finger back when you can just let it be part of the hand? It is the hand! Of course! Fingers and
hands are all one thing, these distinctions are like shackles. I see the
light; it is coming through the napkin. The tiny world in front of your face is an
illusion, and romance itself is an illusion! We gasped.
But it was a delayed gasp, we were a slow group. Even the distribution of the
napkins had been hard to organize. We had finally settled on take one and
pass the rest down. Romance isn’t real, and neither is your world
under the cloth. But because you are human, you can never lift the cloth. So
you might as well learn how to be the most romantic woman you can be. This is
what humans can do: romance. You may now remove the cloth. We felt we
might not be able to, because we were human, but it slid right off and the
auditorium seemed darker than before. I had hoped we would now be another
type of animal, one that could be part of the world. But the cloth was just
a metaphor, and we were forty women gathered on a Saturday morning to become
more romantic. One woman still had the napkin on her head, possibly asleep. We worked
hard because we wanted results. We mirrored each other, and we breathed in no
and breathed out yes. We wrapped our hands around our ankles and pretended
they were someone else’s, and then we tried to run and pretended that someone
else was trying to run, someone we loved, was trying to run away. We held
them by the ankles and we breathed in no and breathed out yes and released
the ankles and ran, all around the auditorium, forty women. Then we came back
to the circle and talked about pheromones and other kinds of mists. Remember, you don’t have to make the whole
world romantic, or even the whole bedroom. Just the small space in front of
your face. A very manageable territory, even the working women will agree.
Because when he looks at you (or she—romance has no biases!), he has to look
through the air in front of your face. Is that space polluted? Is it rosy? Is
it misty? Think about these questions during the lunch break. We ate our
sandwiches and looked at each other through the air in front of our faces. It
looked clear, but maybe it wasn’t. We thought hard about this while we drank
the provided soda. This could change everything. I got up
and stood alone in the hallway and pressed my face to the wall. It was
wood-paneled and smelled like pee, as so many things do. Romance. My
apartment. Romance. My Honda. Romance. My skin condition. Romance. My job. I turned
my head and pressed my other cheek against the wall. The bell
was calling us back together for the wrap-up session. Romance. My utter lack
of friends who shared my interests. Romance. The Soul. Romance. Life on other
planets. Romance. I stared down the hall. Someone was down there. It was
Theresa whom I’d partnered with during breath-mirroring. We had synchronized
our breaths and then syncopated them, and then we had talked about how that
felt and which was more romantic. Syncopated was the right answer. I walked
down the hail and saw that Theresa was sitting on the floor next to a chair.
This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best to just sit
in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all
been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one. I
knelt beside her. I rubbed her back, and then I stopped because I thought it
might be too familiar, but that felt cold, so I patted her shoulder, which
meant I was only touching her a third of the time. The other two thirds, my
hand was either traveling toward her or away from her. The longer I patted,
the harder it became; I was too aware of the intervals between the pats and
couldn’t find a natural rhythm. I felt like I was hitting a conga drum, and
then as soon as I thought of this, I had to beat out a little cha-cha-cha,
and Theresa began to cry I stopped with the patting and hugged her, and she
hugged me back. I had made everything just horrible enough to bring Theresa’s
sadness down to the next level, and I joined her there. It was a place of
overflowing collaborative misery, and we cried together. We could smell each
other’s shampoo and the laundry detergents we had chosen, and I smelled that
she didn’t smoke but someone she loved did, and she could feel that I was
large but not genetically not permanently, just until I found my way again.
The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breasts exchanged
their tired histories, tales of being over- and underutilized, floods and
famines and never mind, just go. We wetted each other’s blouses and pushed
our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten
sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died,
and came to life with a little water. We had loved people we really shouldn’t
have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible
loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and
then run away before anyone could respond. Always
running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther
away until, finally, it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello
into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie
with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have
to go to the bathroom. There were things of this general scale to cry about.
But the biggest reason to cry was to drench the air in front of our faces. It
was romance. Not the falling-in-love kind but the sharing of air between our
shoulders and chests and thighs. There was so much air to share. Gradually,
we slowed, then stopped, and after a long, still pause—goodbye—we broke
apart. Then the euphoria came, warm winds from Theresa
wiped off her backside briskly, as if she had taken a fall. I pulled down the
cuffs of my cardigan. We walked down the hall and entered the auditorium just
in time to help stack the chairs. There was no system for stacking, so we
accidentally made many substacks that were too heavy to lift and join
together. The stacks of various heights stood alone. We gathered our purses
and walked to our cars. So that was
romance! If you liked that story, you’re likely to enjoy the other fifteen
stories in No One
Belongs Here More Than You. Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2007 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/No
One Belongs Here More Than You.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
