| Familial
tales with a post modern twitt |
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For those keeping score, the new wave of modern American fiction—what the writer Ben Marcus refers to as the need to synthesize the heartfelt with the innovative impulse—has now unofficially moved into the era of post-post modernism. (Or is it post-post-post modernism?) The purpose of such labels seems to serve the theorists and academicians rather than the writers, though certainly, when tracing the link between “then and now” one can best follow the evolution of American prose through the convenience of such classifications. Thus, from such progenitors as Robert Coover, Kathy Acker and Donald Barthleme, whose work in turn gave rise to the writings of David Markson, Katherine Dunn and Richard Brautigan, we now have our current crop of trail blazers, including George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, Aimee Bender and Judy Budnitz, whose high-wire act of new short fiction is collected in the exquisitely compelling book, Nice Big American Baby. Readers otherwise unnerved by the mere suggestion of post-modern writing, take heed. While Budnitz’s work is without question innovative and daring, the stories she composes have about them a sense of the glorious familiar. And while realism takes a back seat in Budnitz’s work to the mystical and phantasmic, her prose is nonetheless beautifully cast in stories which never lose sight of the need to create strong, lasting impressions upon the reader. No matter how bold and imaginative her writing is, she never loses sight of the fact that she is at heart a storyteller in the best sense of the word. As the reading public discovered in Budnitz’s first published work of fiction, the novel Flying Leap (1998), produced when she was only 24, Budnitz’s courage as an author allows her to present the most outrageous of fables—and it is as that of a fabulist that her publisher prefers to define Budnitz’s work—in an oddly believable way. In “Sales,” a story in her current collection, a family traps and keeps a group of traveling salesmen locked in a pen; the combination of the absurd with the deadpan “what’s not to believe” contained in the literalism of Budnitz’s writing makes “Sales” work as both a comedy and a cautionary tale. At the heart of Budnitz’s writing is a sense of the familial, an understanding that all people are connected in some way to family, and in a broader sense, to the world at large. In “Motherland,” Budnitz takes this idea to an extreme, creating a dystopia of women wherein the tale begins: “We live on an island of mothers. Fifteen years ago when the war broke out, all the men left our island.... Then our fathers came.” Budnitz clearly associates with the plight of all her characters, and when her stories take on a biting edge, as they often do, it is in the way of a precocious romantic screaming at her elders, “But don’t you get it? All you need is love!” The easiest comparison to make of Budnitz’s work is to Kafza; the political urgency and sense of ‘man against the system’ is in much of her work. Dig a little deeper, however, and you can recognize a bit of Stefan Zweig and Issac Babel as well. In the first story featured in Budnitz’s collection, “Where We Come From,” (also the title of the book) the protagonist is a young Mexican woman, impregnated by rape, who tries desperately to cross the border so that her child will be born in America. By sheer will—and Budnitz’s wondrous prose—the protagonist, named Precious, remains with child for three years, the initial futility of her efforts ultimately fulfilled. “Her son is so big, she imagines he fills her completely, his arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs. She is mere skin covering him, like an insect’s carapace, soon to be flaked off and shucked away.” In order for a story based on the most outrageous of premises to work, the writer must possess perfect pitch and a clear understanding of what is real and why their story has any relevance to the world at large. Budnitz clearly has mastered this. Her stories are not designed merely to shock or titillate but, as in “Miracle” and “The Elephant Boy,” Budnitz creates the wildest of scenarios in which to deliver her own personal indictments indicative of larger philosophical and political concerns. In “Miracle,” for example, Budnitz has a white couple give birth to a black child, and from that point the story gives keen insight into the expectations and reactions to and from the world at large. “Don’t be surprised if he’s a little blue when he comes out,” the story begins, setting up at once expectation and foreboding in one well-cast line. If there are problems with Budnitz’s writing, if I am forced to nitpick and be totally honest, there is on occasion a sense of distance between the reader and some of her stories. Inclined to leave go naming her characters, reluctant to give any sense of place to where her tales originate, Budnitz leaves certain stories to drift. In “Visitors,” for example, an unnamed woman awaits the arrival of her parents and is in contact with them by phone as they drive to her apartment. Throughout, we are given glimpses and slight examples to peek at the relationship the protagonist has with her parents and the man then occupying her apartment, but the story loses its force as the tale dissolves without an ending emotionally anchored to the rest of the tale. All of this, however, is but minor quibbling. At all times, Budnitz’s work is daring and when she uses a narrative voice that is intentionally distant, as in “The Kindest Cut” and “Saving Face,” where the story’s voice has the feel of a memoir or journal entry, there is in hermanner and tone a sweet musical buzz, as if the reader is being invited to glimpse something wondrous and secret. The notion
that innovation among post-modernists must involve a deconstructing
of the classic narrative and divestment of traditional
forms of writing is simply not true. In the case of
Judy Budnitz, readers more inclined towards classical elements of
storytelling will be happy to find an author whose eye remains
at all times firmly trained on that source from
which her personal artistic sensibilities have evolved. In
the case of Nice Big American Baby, the writing is more than
simply engaging, it is brilliant and vibrant and sturdy. Nice
Big American Baby is a profound achievement certain to please anyone
able to appreciate the best of contemporary fiction. A2P |
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