Books: Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender

I like odd stories. Surreal, magical, experimental. I like them because they are unpredictable and surprising. Because my own writing is not like that. Most of all, I like them because they can talk of familiar things (relationships, feelings, conflicts) with unfamiliar precision.

Aimee Bender’s books seem to belong to the camp of magic realism. Willful Creatures is her third one, and like her first collection, it has its requisite magic: a woman discovers a store that sells words; a woman finds seven potatoes in a cast-iron pot, and no matter what she does, she can’t get rid of them; a boy has fingers shaped like keys; a pumpkinhead couple gives birth to an ironhead child. These are lovely stories, emotional, poignant, full of melancholy.

But the stories that affected me the most have no magic at all. They are strange, though. They have flawed characters. In one (“Off”), a lonely rich girl at a party decides she must kiss three men (a redhead, a blonde, and a brunette); in another (“Debbieland”) a group of vicious school girls is terrorizing an unpopular girl. This latter story is at first narrated by a collective “we,” but later a single (if unidentified) narrator emerges. (It shouldn’t work, but it does.) These narrators have oddly appealing confidence to them. Their worldview is whole. But underneath it all lurks doubt. Like everyone else, they’re vulnerable, mortal.

The language, too, is full of unexpected turns. Normally, Aimee Bender’s prose is not flowery. It’s deceptively simple, and this book is no exception. And yet, the language here felt thrilling. In “Death Watch” the sex with a dying man is “like castles; it has moats and turrets.” In “Off,” the narrator says, “[W]ine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen, and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.“

Finally, I’d like to say that I’ve seen Aimee Bender read from her work a few times, and she’s a great reader, generous and down to earth. After her reading at Newtonville Books, for example, she made a point of talking to people, actually initiating conversations, asking what they did and whether they also wrote. So the next time she’s appearing at your local bookstore, by all means go.