The Book-a-Week Project, Week 13

Jenny and the Jaws of Life: Short Stories
Jincy Willett

I've always had a feeling that subtlety and wit were fated to be eternally just out of my grasp, and this book proves it. I read only half the stories, and here's what they were about: a marriage that slowly and painfully dissolves after an argument about the existence of ghosts makes the couple realize they don’t actually know anything about each other; a woman’s rape and the cold distancing of herself from everyone around her afterwards; a man trying to deal with the murder of his sister (with a shotgun to the back of the head) by the couple's children; a man cheating on his wife who has a breast tumor; a woman who deliberately attempts to hurt her father by withholding any demonstration of affection.

These are the story premises of a book that David Sedaris (its cover blares) called “just the funniest collection of stories I’ve ever read”. Kirkus Reviews called it “first-rate comic writing”. Those accolades, in addition to numerous mentions of her wit, force me accept that I must not get something about the stories. To me, they seem morbid and depressing. Willett’s language is precise and complex, for sure, but it seemed to be used to tell stories that are about nothing more than the character’s emotional distance from everyone they know and ultimately themselves. I expected to laugh or smile somewhere and kept searching for the story that held that trigger. I found “Résumé”, which is a short proposal to God for eternal life in exchange for nothing. Funny for its four and a half pages, but not worth the slog through so much sadness.

If I had a blurb on the book, it would say, “Miserable, depressing, and very smart.”

Thankfully, David Wellington’s Monster Nation awaits me at the library. It’s the sequel to Monster Island. Wellington is nowhere near as skilled a writer as Jincy Willett, but his subject matter is much closer to my heart: MOTHERFUCKING ZOMBIES.