By S.P. MacIntyre Aug 13, 2009, 14:30 GMT
Reading a succession of stories about break-ups, lost loves, romantic spurning, and flings-gone-wrong can do something weird to your brain. If you’ve ever been in a failed relationship or many, reading about people’s botched affairs over and over again can induce episodes of the romantic equivalent of PTSD—at least, I found this to be the case with myself.
In its best moments, the writing in this collection can give you that hollow ache in your gut you get when a relationship simply isn’t working. At its worst, the writing just reminds you of a lovelorn lament, an eye-roll inducing rush of words that remind you of how tedious and annoying a breakup can really be.
This subject, love and romance gone awry, is the focal point of the new anthology published by Plume, Love is a Four-Letter Word, edited by Michael Taeckens.
Still, the diversity of the prose styles do keep even the most repetitive aspects of the content somewhat interesting: some of the stories read like you’re sitting in a bar with a good friend who’s telling you about the one that got away, others read as simply well-written stories.
If you’re looking for humor and wit, I recommend skipping straight to Junot Diaz, Maud Newton, George Singleton, or Brock Clarke. Clarke’s story, “Leave Me Something When You Leave Me,” begins with, “She didn’t leave me with a broken heart, but she did leave me bleeding from both wrists and lying faceup in a puddle of someone else’s vomit, wearing someone else’s shirt,” and had me laughing out loud before the end.
If you’re looking for the more somber, regretful or introspective type of story, I have to suggest skipping to Jennifer Finney Boylan, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Jami Attenberg, or Wendy Brenner’s “I Love You in Twelve Languages,” which is just painfully sad.
There are also some sequential art entries in here by Lynda Barry, Emily Flake, and (I don’t know if two post-its count) Patty Van Norman. I wasn’t blown away by these stories told through comics, but it is definitely good to see comics being considered for short story anthologies.
Many of the entries in Love is a Four-Letter Word emphasize the sexual facet of a relationship, but the bent of these stories is not towards the erotic. Some of the stories are exceptionally good-natured and innocent: the remembrance of a first crush, the first kiss, the first case of chronic butterflies-in-the-stomach syndrome. A lot of these narratives are loaded with as much nostalgia as they are regret.
One commonality I found between some of the stories is the tendency to make lists of pros and cons, as though these authors are still, years later, trying to weigh the benefits against the hindrances of their past relationships much in the same way as when they were trying to determine whether the relationship was worth being in to begin with. Whether this tendency occurs in list-form or not, most of the authors in this collection acknowledge, with the distance of some years, that their relationships featured the good and the bad, the dismal and the hilarious.
I don’t know if Neal Pollack, who wrote the introduction, would agree, but there’s a curious catharsis I felt in reading this book, even if it reminded me at times of my own romantic shortcomings.
Though it was occasionally painful slogging through another story about another jack-ass significant other/another self-induced relationship sabotage/another awkward sexual experience, there were many moments that had me laughing out loud, and throughout I couldn’t shake the feeling of “well, at least I’m not alone in having had something like this happen to me.”
Buy this anthology if you’re looking for something like this, it’s a pretty good feeling, or if you’re just looking for a couple of well-written and funny accounts of the pitfalls and dangers of dating.
Product Details
* Paperback: 320 pages * Publisher: Plume (July 28, 2009) * Language: English * ISBN-10: 0452295505 * ISBN-13: 978-0452295506 * Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
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