Reviews

It's rare instances that you encounter or accomplish something that fills a void you possibly didn't know you had. I'm positive I've known my whole life that language fills my voids, countless voids, spaces where there are supposed to be words but I don't have the right ones and someone else comes along and writes them, or speaks them. But then there have been times where I didn't know I needed something and it has smartly slid up next to me, as in the case (a second time around) of the book we're reading for Book Club now. This was my selection. My first collision with this book took place in Detroit while I had fistfuls of Saturdays free to mope about not being with Craig. At the time and as a distraction from moping, I read this book in one sitting. To refresh myself, and to get some outside perspective, I selected this for Book Club. I've gotten the impression from the other girls that this isn't the best book they've ever read, and that they likely could have done without this one in our repertoire (as an aside, we haven't officially met on this selection yet so I run the risk of making presumptions based on a few offhanded remarks in passing thus far). And in another moment of my life I might not have wanted to share it, might have wanted to hide it amongst the spines of my book collection, unobtrusive, my own favorite without the danger of someone else deciding it was their favorite, too (a strange selfish notion I once vaguely believed in but have since moved beyond to become the tender-hearted and giving person that I am today). Nevertheless, I've refinished half of the book and rediscovered why it filled such gaping spaces in me that I hadn't known I needed filled. There is a precision to her language typically unique to that of a surgeon replacing a heart. There are pages after pages of phrasing that demand much more than a brief scan or a single half-absorbed read, phrases that deliver punches, plant kisses, or tickle behind the knee. She doesn't just write these words as an author; her narrator breathes them right off the pages. I've attempted in vain to consider a few reviews of this book written shortly after its publication, and each review refreshes the skeleton of the story: Math teacher, kind of crazy, losing dad to unnamed illness. Boy meets crazy girl. They fall in love. She's still eccentric. Crazy math teacher, obsessed with numbers. And I by no means can claim masterful abilities to review a book, but I think the point is repeatedly missed: the narrator in this book constantly clings to her eccentricity to pump the blood in her veins, yes. A fire of more normal reality than her own is lit in her by a man, yes. She doesn't know how to deal with pending loss, yes. But these themes, while certainly common in literature, contemporary fiction, movies and television, are penned by Bender so delicately in her book, like piecing together shattered shells of an egg perfectly so that you cannot see the seams of the cracks. She soars above writing it, she instead crafts the concept of constant emptiness in Mona, the crazy math teacher. Bender's children in Mona's class practically invent themselves, seemingly without Bender's permission as an author, to catch Mona in her most fragile moments, instances where Mona herself feels voids, fleetingly decides that literally chopping herself down like a tree could save her father, convincing herself that signs of death are all around and go unrecognized. Passages as basic as "He was looking out the window at something else" transport those words strung together, of an image of someone gazing distractedly, to a different level altogether, one where the simplicity of the phrase "something else" persuades the reader to look up from the page herself on impulse, look out the window, and see an unnamed something else. Other phrases could not be more perfectly etched, such as, "I'd never seen my father garden but its seemed like a good activity for a faded person..." and "cherries, bright as blood cells." In other instances Bender paints scenes painfully and with such depth, the image nearly steps off the page into your presence. For instance her depiction of the neighboring Stuart girl's hypothetical reaction to her first sexual encounter laced with the memory of losing her baby sister to death: "The boyfriend asks her: Do you like babies? And she says: Babies? Babies? I'm not sure. He now removes her shirt. While she feels her breast kissed for the first time in her life, something sweeter than an ache, a sharpened ache, a purified ache, she is thinking of that creamy movement inside the crib. It had been a girl. That had been her only sister. The youngest. She was supposed to outlive them all." In swift swells of sentences Bender can transform lifeless words into vibrant color, sound and scent, life, and life's epitaph, death. For this reason, for the fact that Bender's language fills countless longing spaces for me, I genuinely love this book. As I read it for Book Club this time around, I'm trying to recognize its tragic flaws as a polished piece of fiction. And they do exist. At points, Mona's obsessive compulsive disorder is just a prop. At points, Mr. Jones' number necklaces are over-stated. But as a full piece of fiction, this book heightens my love of a rope of words braided to communicate passion and hollow sadness. I'm only left to wonder if Bender convinced herself of these characters as much as she convinced me.*PS: I did unearth an intelligent, sweet and concise review on a website I check occasionally, www.readingdivas.com ...