88
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
WHAT’S LIFE WORTH? a review by Laura S. Segura Karen E. Bender, Refund: Stories. Berkeley, Counterpoint Press, 2015.
LAURA S. SEGURA is a graduate assistant for Women and Gender Studies at University of Louisiana Lafayette pursuing her Master’s degree in Literary Studies. KAREN E. BENDER has also published two novels, Like Normal People (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and A Town of Empty Rooms (Counterpoint Press, 2013). This Los Angeles native is on the faculty at UNC WIlmington.
Refund, a collection of thirteen short stories, illustrates Karen Bender’s insight into the value of human life while demonstrating how monetary concerns and fear pervade the lives of her characters. Bender’s stories contain powerful images that relate her acute knowledge of the modern human condition, everyday people struggling with a volatile economy, emotional upheaval, and traumatic loss. In “Reunion,” the first story in the collection, Bender brilliantly blends together the multiple fears that the Green family is facing: financial ruin, a mass shooting, their child’s sleep training, and physical intimacy. Bender describes Anna Green and her family as ones who “behaved as though they were middle class, [while] the money rushed in and out for nothing” (2). A mass shooting at Anna’s twentieth high school reunion causes her to wonder how she could have possibly survived and escaped unwounded, yet she dryly realizes that her family “could not [have] afford[ed] to fix her” (7). Bender parallels Anna’s fears with those of her child who “had developed a problem going to sleep . . . [and] rejected all offerings of comfort – toys, juice, songs – and stood in the dark light, screaming” (9). Anna’s husband recognizes that their children, like themselves, could do anything “if they [could] just shed their fear” (21). While Bender’s portrayal of a family’s anxiety and conflict is realistically stinging, her writing is also fresh and bold with tactile imagery; this reader’s favorite of which was Bender’s description of that familiar smell in a neighboring store of a poorly ventilated Subway, which made the rooms smell of “salami and sliced ham” (15).
A vastly different family is portrayed in “Anything for the Money”; instead of struggling lower-middle class, the Weiss family, on the surface, is the epitome of Hollywood dysfunction. Bender crafts a deeply intriguing character in Lenny Weiss, an executive producer of a popular TV game show, who is oddly reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge with a sprinkling of Kardashian level fame. Bender expertly reveals a deeper side of Weiss as well, through his struggling writing career as a young husband frantically looking for work during the recession of the 1970s. Weiss credits his selfmade glory to the desperation he once felt when “his daughter was screaming in pain from an ear infection, but he was afraid to take her to a doctor for what it would cost”; he exploited his own emotions by creating a game show for desperate people willing to do anything for money (53). Bender’s depiction of the TV mogul is balanced with honest, raw emotion as Weiss begins to care for his ailing granddaughter Aurora, and Bender thoughtfully illustrates the tragic truth that there are some problems even money can’t fix. In “The Loan Officer’s Visit,” Bender uses elements of a coming of age story to show her narrator’s journey of reconciling herself with her parents’ limitations. While the crux of the awareness occurs well into the narrator’s adult life, Bender demonstrates the bond some adults have with their parents. The narrator laments her parents’ past refusals: “I asked them to visit me in Tucson at eighteen, Seattle at twenty-four, Brooklyn at twenty-seven, Richmond at thirty-five. No. No. No” (106); yet,