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IMPRINT, Friday, September 29, 1995
Send Me an Angel, Right Now debilitating everyday loneliness of our lives. To be sure, Angels resonates with some familiar postmodern tactics. Moody recasts familiar icons (doomed whaling vessel in “Pip Adrift”, dead film star in “The James Dean Garage Band”) and in “A Good Story” he lampoons the truisms of story structure: crisis, theme, etc. Other pieces take on peculiar shapesa stream-of-consciousness film treatment, deposition notes, a termpaperand the book concludes with “Primary Sources,” in which Moody’s own autobiography takes the form of bibliographic notes appended to some of his favourite books and records. Also included among the “Primary Sources” is an installment of Star Trek: The Next Grnerution that, writes Moody, is “a big episode for those who realize how hard communicating really is.” It’s a recurring theme throughout the collection. Characters are isolated by their own idiosyncracies, and their random overtures to society seem mis-
The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven by Rick Moody Little, Brown and Company 241 pages, $29.95 by Derek Weiter special to imprint
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ome believe that recent years have seen a swing away from intellectual, metafictive concerns. These days, young writers are supposed to be more concerned with simply telling stories than with asking themselves what exactly a story is. If that’s the casethat is, if the postmodern experiment is truly on the declinethen somebody forgot to tell Rick Moody. The NYC-based novelist has just published a book of short fiction that seems to pay homage to landmark ’60s collections like John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse and Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Ilesr:ants. In the eleven pieces making upThuRinguj?lrighfest Angels Around Heaven, Moody (like Barth and &over) dismantles narrative conventions and reassembles them into twisted shapes, deliriously playing with structure and form. There is something more to Moody’s achievement, though: a strong emotional investment and power that wasn’t always present in the work of his forbears. Only three books into his career, Moody is already a minor literary superstar, having published in all the right places (Puris Review, Harper’s, N~M? Yorker) and served as a Del&r back-page star to boot. He’s written one rather dull novel (Garden Srtite) and one intriguing one (The ice Sturm) that evinced an affection for kitsch culture as well as a
Amanfor all Seasons willingness to grapple with Big Philosophical Questions. For me, Ihough, it’s taken this new collection of thoughtfully sequenced and arranged stories to bring his work into focus. More than a sharp, cerebral experimentalist, Moody is also a sentimental chronicler of human pain, howling at the
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placed and unnerving. Accordingly, many stories are imagined as peculiar confessionals in which the narrator unwittingly gives away his own unreliability - or insanity. (Perhaps the best example is “The Apocalypse Notes of Bob Pa:isner”, comprising a delusional student’s creepy, pale fire-stoking termpaper.) It’s the insanity and degradations of the lonely that fuel the best work in Angels. Mesmerizing stories like “The Grid” and “The James Dean Garage Band” comment on the sad, random chaos of our loves and endeavours. And the title story is a harrowing ride through the seamy side of NYC life, with drug addiction, sexual deviance and AIDS marking the path. Tremendously compassionate, but also clear-eyed and honest, and technically daring to boot,irbe Ring off?rightest Angels Around Heaven is a superb literary achievement, like the collection to which it lends its name.
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Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl as told to Virginia Lee Barnes & Janice Boddy Vintage Canada 336 pages, $14.95 paperback by Tracy Hunt special to Imprint
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man: The Story of a Somali Girl is the story of one woman’s struggle to overcome a male dominated society in order to become her own person. Told to Virgina Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy after Barnes’ death, Aman tells a poignant tale of one girl’s journey into womanhood. Aman has an interesting life and family past to say the least. Her grandmother lived through a tribal war in which she saw most of‘ the males in her family massacred. Only she, three of her sisters, and three of her cousins survived. Her grandmother marries a rich and much older man to have a home and provide a good life for her and her children. including Aman’s mother. Aman’s mother could have written her own book about her life. Her father forced her to marry, at age 15, she divorced 4 months later, married again, then divorced, married a third time, divorced again... all together she was married six times and divorced six times. Getting a divorce in Somalia is a fairly easy thing to do. A husband needs only to get a divorce paper, say Linlqad meaning “I divorce thee” three times in front of witnesses, and the divorce is final. For a woman, its not that simple. she must pester a man for a divorce until he gets sick of her and divorces her, or she can divorce him if he comes at her from behind (interpret as you will), is impotent (which she must prove by having sex with him in front of a judge), or chokes her. A man needs no reason. During her mother’s sixth marriage, Aman was born. When her parents were divorced, she stayed with her mother, which is not the norm. In Somali, you trace your lineage through the father and you are always part of your father’s family. Even when you marry, your first loyalty is to your father’s family. Therefore, when divorce occurs, the children stay with the father. Aman inherited her strength and independence from her mother. After her sixth divorce, her mother dedicated herself to taking care of her mother, her children, and her numerous businesses. In childhood, Aman went through everything from tuberculosis to the death of her sister, to forbidden love between her and a white boy from Italy. At age nine, she was
circumcised, which is the norm in Somalia. During this section I admit that I was disgusted and had my legs crossed as they described how they removed the clitoris and sewed her vagina shut in order to be sure that she will still be a virgin when she marries, which she does when she is thirteen. She marries a man in his SO’s and here her story for independence begins. The marriage takes place without her family’s knowledge and she regrets it from the start. Her husband refuses to give her a divorce and thus she begins a cycle of running away and being brought back to him, during which time she finds a life on the street. Living on the street earns her the name of asharmuuto or prostitute, even though she is not yet. She does learn how to control men and trick them into giving her money. She wants better for herself, and from there the story concentrates on her struggle to rise above her current situation. Aman’s life is interesting. The weakness of the book, though, lies in the way it is told. Aman narrated to two different women in English which is her third language which, frankly, she does not speak that well. There seems to be no editing done at all and the charm of her simple terms and repeating of certain phrases over and over quickly wears thin. Also, Aman is supposed to appear as a victim, yet to me she. was very much in control of what she did. She lies to everyone she meets and seems to thrive in her rebellion. She wants to be accepted, yet she continuously does things which she knows will bring her and her family more shame. Maybe she does this because her father paid no attention to her as a child and she always wanted his approval, and at least this way he notices she is alive. But I’m no psych major. Another thing that bothered me was the overuse of exclamation marks! I know that this is supposed to be a moving and exciting tale but I don’t need all these exclamation marks at the end of every other sentence! Other than that the story she told was fairly entertaining, though I was disappointed at how she ended it. Elasically, she said, “I want to end my story now...” and the reader is left wondering “welLI, what the hell happened?’ In the foreword you know that she married an American in 1982 whom she met in Italy. She ends the story in the mid-sixties while she is married to someone else still living in Somalia. I am disappointed that she did not continue to the: present day. Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl is an interesting look into a different culture. You just have to over look the simplistic way it is told and hope that the authors will someday let us know what happened to Aman.