Elizabeth's Reviews > Verge

I so wanted to like this collection of stories. Yuknavitch's prose is provocative and interesting, but most of the stories fell flat for me. While her use of sex and the gritty realism of the precariat can be haunting and dramatic as in "The Organ Runner" and "Second Language," her over-reliance on the same themes makes her writing feel gimmicky and forced. I wonder if part of the problem is how the collection is structured, whereas reading one or two stories individually would prevent that.

Another issue is that Yuknavitch also feels like an edgier Dave Eggers, someone who creates imaginary narratives to reveal the margins in often problematic ways for a privileged group of readers. "Street Walker" addresses this exact problem in its plot (a female professor buying a prostitute's time so that the other woman can "rest"), and yet, in many ways, the lack of interesting commentary about the entire discourse of women's labor, empathy, or class "slumming," represented exactly what these stories were doing. In fact, many of the stories left me feeling uncomfortable, not because of their edgy content, but because I felt as if Yuknavitch was problematically imagining the life of the marginalized through its pat narrative voice.

The last issue was the Yuknavitch tries to dabble in both realism and modernist narrative techniques, but embraces neither. Just to write about sex is no longer edgy or radical, and I was left wishing Yuknavitch had done something more - a new modernism or more realist details or more direct political commentary.