Customer Reviews

The Women Were Leaving the Men (Made in Michigan Writers Series) (Made in Michigan Writers Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found this book by chance at work and started leafing through it, eventually finishing the whole thing by reading a few pages every day. Each of the stories is a microcosm, at the center of which is a vulnerable, well meaning but very deeply emotionally flawed person. The problems encountered by the characters are problems that everyone faces, like the realization that one's deepest desires might be hopelessly at odds with one another, or that behaving in a way consistent with one's values and morals might be really, really difficult. That said, the people in these stories are probably unusually beset with neuroses and more psychological issues than normal -- there's a Harvard law drop out whose frightening, ugly nervous breakdown annihilates his sense of worth and identity in one story and a young, kind, but self conscious priest who finds comfort and reprieve in a woman in another.

To read these stories is to get fascinating, first hand insight into what it feels like to struggle with uncertainty and hopefully come out with some semblance of dignity and self worth. Highly recommended.

I was amazed at how good these stories were. I heard about Mozina from a friend who is more linked into the contemporary literature scene than I am, and ended up reading the stories over a greedy few days.

In overall tone, I think the writer Mozina most resembles is Mary Gaitskill. In fact, this book, Mozina's debut collection, reminds me a lot of Gaitskill's own debut, "Bad Behavior." There is the same focus on "edgy" (even occasionally creepy) characters, a fairly large amount of sex and sadness, intense psychological depth, and terrific writing throughout.

However, I have to say that Mozina has a better sense of humor than Gaitskill. As some of the other reviews point out, the opening story "Cowboy Pile" is hilarious, and yet it is poignant, too, in its bizarre way. But despite the sometimes bizarre and even raunchy themes of these stories, there are also passages where the writing is almost Nabokovian. For example, in the story "Arch," when two tortured lovers are on a road trip together across the flat Midwest, Mozina writes: "Overpasses, gentle reminders of the third dimension, arc briefly and subside." The only other recent book that caught me unawares with tight, pellucid observations like this was Eugenides' "Middlesex."

My only quibble with this collection was that I thought one story, "Beach," should have been left on the cutting-room floor. It was the only one that didn't really ring true for me, and at least shows that Mozina is fallible. But, overall, the other twelve stories really captured me and had someting truly unusual: the ability to surprise and delight. For example, in the last story, "Admit," which chronicles the wrenching psychological descent of a Harvard Law dropout, there is a description of the protagonist's girlfriend and touchstone: "She wore clogs and her fuzzy pink cape, which made her look like some third-tier superhero whose defining power was a staggering capacity for empathy." In the midst of reading about a harrowing breakdown, you can't help but smile.

Just be warned, this collection is not for anyone uptight about sex. Many (but not all) of these stories have sex as part of their subject. If you're not a prude, however, in the story "The Enormous Hand," you'll be rewarded by one of the most memorably weird sex scenes in contemporary literature; it is funny and moving at the same time (think Kafka-meets-Updike and you'll not be completely off the mark). It alone is worth the price of admission.

This collection of short stories is nothing short of amazing. This motley collection of characters may appear odd on the outside, but each of them in their own way speaks to some truth of the human condition. I look forward to hearing more from Mozina--hopefully soon!

"Out on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of human cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then somebody lies across him, and then a third guy piles on. Then one after another. Sometimes you'll see a pile from the Interstate." (from "Cowboy Pile," pg. 1)

How is it that nonsense can bring tears to our eyes? Because we are all more nonsense than sense? Could be. And if that is so, Andy Mozina, associate professor of English at Kalamazoo College, has taken a good look into our quirky side and piled the quirks up so high that we can't miss them, or shouldn't, and will hear the echoes resonate in our crumpled dysfunctional souls as we page through his collection of stories, The Women Were Leaving the Men. Mozina holds up a mirror, and even if we don't want to look, we must, we can't help it, we wince and we stare. Yup. There we are, all in a cowboy pile.

With this grand opening piled up as a guidepost, Mozina leads us from one intriguing dysfunction to another, from obsession to oddity to deformity to vanity to fetish.

In "Privacy, Love, Loneliness," we read of teen angst and spiraling hormones, circling around a "dead sock" that young Brian has rescued from the bag the coveted Gracie has left behind in his room. Similarly, he circles Gracie, closing in on the big moment: rites of passage in adolescence, clumsy and overheated, and lonely even when together.

In "The Enormous Hand," we meet the hand that measures 24 inches from tip of pinky to tip of thumb, attached to a man, but coming to symbolize all the twitchy places in humanity come alive and ugly when we encounter difference in our fellow humans.

"My Way of Crying" brings us to other places we wish we didn't have to go, yet too many do. Travel has a way of exposing in us what the every day often keeps hidden, bringing it to the surface. Husband and wife head out on a road trip, their differences bristling when enclosed in the small space of a Honda, and when the husband can't sleep at night in a strange motel, he wanders up to the front desk to be, well, "serviced" by the pretty young thing as his wife sleeps down the hall. When the wife's depression leaks out the following day on the road, he tells her he loves her, leaving the reader to wonder: how often do we mean loathe when we say love? Even as we speak to and of ourselves.

More gems: "Beach" puts function back into dysfunction, a sand grain of brilliance in this collection; "The Arch" the St. Louis Arch to the arch of a foot as two sex addicts make an odd couple built on mutual fetish, imitating with a craving to be normal in a sadly deranged manner; "Moon Man" is a retired astronaut caring for his stroke-ridden mother, even though he left Mom's and another woman's photos on the moon, the women he wanted to leave behind; "The Love Letter" bonds teen boy to white-haired woman working a convenience store counter in an unlikely tryst that appears to be a crudely casual exchange of needs and wants but boils down to what even the most casual encounters still turn out to be, no matter young or old: written into her rambling letter to the boy, relating her own wretched youth--everyone is looking for an emotional connection, a true intimacy, however disguised.

And more pile up, one atop the other, a leaning tower of weirdness we recognize as human upon human. The title story, "The Women Were Leaving the Men," is the crowning glory. Mozina appears to have the ability to crawl inside the female skull, tamper with the female heart, and cross the gender divide as only the rare writer can--to pin down exactly the inconsistencies, the paradoxes, the manipulations, the discomforting webs of lies we tell ourselves and each other as we pair off and head for the moonlit horizon. This may not be the wisdom that the self-help books for saving relationships advise, but wisdom it is, at least, keenest observation.

Mozina sums it up himself as he concludes this collection: "You don't even know if your own self is capable of cooperating with your deepest desires."

Andy Mozina's writing is especially good at finding real feeling amongst eccentric, unstable, or even unhinged characters and situations. People in these stories often engage in behavior so bizarre that it could be off-putting to anyone but a lover of same, but the sympathy with which Mozina writes the characters does not allow us to turn away so easily. And often times these people know they need to change, but can't. Mozina dramatizes these bad choices very well.

Everyone knows, for example, that an abusive relationship is hard to leave. But why? Mozina dramatizes the decisions, good and bad, that could plausibly lead to a failure to change your approach to bad relationships. We see it happen and understand it, without necessarily being able to explain it.

Or why do our desires and fetishes rule us so, when all we want to do is end their hold on us? Again, we see people in these stories making decisions we know are wrong, that doom them, but recognize our own bad decisions in them.

And of course, the collection opens with "Cowboy Piles," the gold standard for dramatization of the male need to show physical courage and moral strength, even when it's ridiculous. If you are ever lucky enough to attend a reading by Andy Mozina, you should call out for "Cowboy Piles" like it's your last chance to hear your favorite song from your favorite band at their last encore in their farewell performance. Read aloud, the story is that good.

Most of these stories are zany as hell. We're talking a cross between Douglas Adams zany, Robin Williams zany, Monty Python zany, with a very slight hint of Woody Allen. (The Woody Allen ingredient is more a flavor than a brand of zany.)

In many of these stories, the main character is on a continuum, with "I'm OK" on one end, and "I've totally lost 'it'" on the other end. The stories relate how these characters keep 'it' together, work thru 'it', endeavor to get beyond 'it'; the characters work to 'stay onboard' rather than 'go overboard'. The characters in general deal with normal life situations and feelings in very funny, wacky ways.

These stories are very accessible, and I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. :-)