An Invisible Sign of My Own [Hardcover]

Aimee Bender (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 18, 2000

An incandescent novel by one of America's most gifted young writers.

With her stunning debut collection of stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender showed herself to be "a writer who makes you glad for the very existence of language" San Francisco Chronicle. The book was a sensation; it spent seven weeks on The Los Angeles Times bestseller list, received ecstatic reviews nationwide, and established Aimee Bender as one of the freshest and most original voices in American fiction.

In An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender exceeds her early promise. She gives us the story of Mona Gray, a second-grade math teacher who has just turned twenty--a number which, like all numbers in her life, seems to have a profound significance. Mona lives her life under the shadow of her father's long, weird, unnamed illness and her own bizarre compulsions. She excels at music, running, and sex, but ceases each activity just at the moment enjoyment becomes intense: Mona is "in love with quitting."  Only numbers provide the order and beauty she craves. "Mix up some numbers and you get an equation for the way the wind shifts or an axiom for the movement of water, or the height of someone, or for how skin feels. You can account for softness. You can explain everything." With construction paper and Magic Markers, Mona arranges her classroom into "a beautiful museum of numbers," but that could also describe her life: a collection of oddities, a static place, a hushed and insular world where disruption is unwelcome. Then the science teacher arrives, with burn marks on his fingers and a genius for teaching children the joys of coughing, and Mona's strange and tidy universe is threatened by love, the supreme disorder.  In her luminous, pitch-perfect prose, Bender conjures a dream world much like our own, a fairy tale grounded in a penetrating sense of what moves the human heart.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Aimee Bender's funny, delicately shaded first novel is a constant delight, even at its most warped. An Invisible Sign of My Own tells the story of Mona Gray, a math wiz and a high school track star, whose ordinary childhood comes to pieces when her father is stricken with a mysterious illness. There doesn't seem to be a name for it, but he looks sort of gray and seems frail and unhappy. Whether there's anything really wrong with Mona's dad is unclear, but her fear that he will die, as well as his withdrawal from family life--no more vacations, no running practice with his daughter, no unplanned outings--triggers a corresponding withdrawal in her. Whenever she does well at anything, or starts to enjoy herself, she quits: piano class, dancing lessons, her first boyfriend, running.

I quit dessert to see if I could do it; of course I could; I quit breathing one evening until my lungs overruled; I quit touching my skin, sleeping with both hands under the pillow. When no one was home, I tied ropes around the piano, so that it would take me thirty minutes with scissors to get back to that minuet. Then I hid all the scissors.

Instead of working out her problems, Mona develops a habit of knocking on wood, and sometimes knocks for an hour before getting to sleep. Eating soap is her other dark indulgence: a surefire anti-aphrodisiac that she calls on whenever she feels sexually attracted to a man.

At 20, Mona is recruited to teach math at the local elementary school. To her surprise, she is a brilliant teacher, making addition and subtraction tangible to second graders with a game called Numbers and Materials, in which the students bring in natural or man-made objects that take the form of numbers. When 7-year-old Lisa Venus brings in a zero made of IV tubing from her dying mother's hospital room, Mona recognizes a kindred spirit. But she will have to be healthy herself to help Lisa resist her urge to take on her mother's illness out of grief and loyalty. The complicated connection between children and adults is the underlying theme of this big-hearted novel. However quirky and alarming Bender's methods may seem, An Invisible Sign of My Own is no darker than a fairy tale, and the witch--even if it's the witch within--is reliably vanquished in the end. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Clever, original and written with brio and eloquence, Bender's first novel (after the praised short story collection The Girl with the Flammable Skirt) may not appeal to every taste, but those who respond to its depressed, quirky heroine in her anguished search for safety from life's disasters will feel instant love. At 20, Mona Gray has deliberately made herself as colorless as her name. A decade ago, when her adored father fell victim to a mysterious illness that has left him drained of energy, hope and desire for human contact, Mona too retreated from life and deliberately stopped aspiring for success or happiness. Having turned her back on achievement as a track star and on sharing love, Mona still nourishes one source of happiness: the world of mathematics. Numbers, being clear and immutable, are Mona's salvation, as well as her job. She teaches arithmetic to second graders, having invented a zany curriculum in which her students find numbers everywhere in the environment. Kids love Mona, although she constantly and compulsively knocks on wood to keep disaster at bay. Everyone else seems unaware of her emotional isolationAbut everyone else in this novel is also pretty strange. Mr. Jones, Mona's former high school math teacher, wears numbers around his neck to indicate his daily mood. Mona wears "an invisible sign of my own" that denotes her fear and vulnerability. Then awkward, unsociable science teacher Michael Smith, who shares Mona's morbid imagination, breaks through her emotional reserve. Meanwhile, she has developed a particular fondness for seven-year-old Lisa Venus, who is actually experiencing the real terror of loss and abandonment that Mona fears: her mother is dying of cancer. In a satisfying denouement in which Bender brings the narrative full circle with astonishing dexterity, Mona discovers how to connect and live fully, and helps Lisa to navigate her own way through a frightening world. Readers may find the narrative too schematic and the characters exceptionally odd. On the other hand, Bender writes like an angel, with images that strike resonant chords, and her sly humor pervades every page. And those who are initially put off by the bizarre fairy tale that opens the narrative will be touched almost to tears when it comes full circle. Author tour. (July) FYI: Bender is the sister of Karen Bender, author of Like Normal People (Forecasts, Feb. 21).
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (July 18, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385492235
• ISBN-13: 978-0385492232
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #207,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Knock on wood, August 19, 2001

By 

"insectwings" (Cinti, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Invisible Sign of My Own (Hardcover)

From the moment I started the beginnings of this book, I found it absoultely irresistible. In fact, I found it very complicated to even put it down. I read through it in most of one sitting, even denying myself the simplicity of water.

Aimee Bender gives us a wonderfilled, poetic story about Mona Gray. A woman, turned 20, obsessed with numbers and good luck. This incredible story reaches far into the reader, taking a life of it's own deep inside, even though far from insouciant.

A must read for Plath lovers, as parts of the novel remind me of Esther Greenwood (The Bell Jar), and in reality, these two could have been best of friends, or better yet...worst enemies.

Bender turns obsession and compulsion into a moving story of a woman that knows too much...and too little.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I always wanted the stories to last longer and now they do, July 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: An Invisible Sign of My Own (Hardcover)

I loved Flammable Skirt so when I heard Bender was writing a novel I bought it immediately. I love it! She delivers on the promise of her stories in a way I wouldn't have imagined. The darkness that was present in the stories about the Ice Girl and the Fire Girl or The Rememberer, is deeply explored in this novel. The novel has a weighty sadness which is revealed through the prism of Bender's magical language. In terms of what it has to say about family too, this book is both frightening and relevant. I am so happy to spend a whole book with her characters.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Weird and wonderful, October 16, 2000

By 

Cathrine A. McClure "cathrine6" (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Invisible Sign of My Own (Hardcover)

Coping with dying is difficult, but this book gives the reader an interesting perspective on how one can go on living when someone close to them is ill or dying. Wearing our heart on our sleeve, or a number on our chest, doesn't guarantee that we'll be noticed or treated differently. Mostly, we are left to deal with life's troubles on our own. However, if we find like-minded souls in the world, and we reach out to them, we can help each other embrace our time on earth as a gift, while at the same time letting go of those who must move on. Although this story has many weird aspects and quirks (which I find refreshing), it also holds an important message for anyone who cares to notice.