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  • Unavoidable Misreading
  • Amanda McLaughlin (bio)
Make Me Do Things
Victoria Redel
Four Way Books
www.fourwaybooks.com
200Pages; Print, $17.95

In a world that privileges the grotesque, the excessive, the overexposed, Victoria Redel’s Make Me Do Things is a welcome exercise in understatement. The antithesis to orgiastic streams of adverbs and sophomoric emotional epiphanies, Redel’s collection is an elegant, economic composition, whose stories perform the various ways we erect and sabotage our lives, our loves, and the stories we tell ourselves.

The eleven stories in Make Me Do Things chronicle the desires and despairs of everyday life: we encounter wives with cataclysmic lovers, women beleaguered by infertility, men castrated by their own misunderstanding, children plagued by their parent’s bored neglect. In the hands of a lesser writer, Redel’s characters could quickly seem melodramatic or contemptible, or still worse, saccharinely predictable: we know, or think we know, all about bad parents and precocious, clear-eyed children; we know, or think we know, about erotic disappointments. But Redel’s careful, nuanced prose forbids easy readings and easy judgments; indeed, the stories revel in ethical ambiguities, muddy what we might like to keep separate, study the way desire and grief coalesce.

Redel’s protagonists are often parents, dazed observers who figure their misdeeds and misfortunes as strange amalgamations of inevitability and chance. Take, for example, Sasha of “On Earth,” whose affair with an environmental anarchist is described with an almost drugged detachment: “The lover was her first lover. She had not been looking. Sometimes coming into his room is something that she felt she had been inadvertently pushed into.” In this valence, Sasha shades her infidelity as a fluke of the weather, a thunderstorm that just happened to pass through, with her (and us) vulnerable to its lightshow and sound. This statement might at first align her with a series of narrators who, via a series of syntactic slides, abdicate themselves of responsibility for their behavior and its effects (Think of Duane from Carver’s haunting, masterful “Gazebo”). Indeed, this reading is supported when we consider that Sasha doesn’t seem to particularly like her lover that much, and that she does, in fact, love her husband—about whom she “has no complaint,”—with whom she enjoys a fulfilling emotional and sexual relationship. And so, by articulating the affair as inevitable, but discrete from her everyday life—“a place outside the known limit”—Sasha is able to likewise situate her cloudy desire for the lover as something outside of her understanding, able to uncouple her actions from any sort of direct motivation. As we might expect, this disassociation is a fantasy that’s destined for failure; Sasha ends the affair when she finds the lover’s obsessively detailed plans to interact with her daughter, Ella. All at once, her lover—alternative reality embodied—muscles his way into her “real” life, and violates the emotional opportunities and intricacies and pleasures that life and world entail: “Why had she ever spoken about Ella in this room?” Sasha shakily asks.

But this is not just a mother being brought to her senses, or a moralizing tale where the woman’s true priorities and privileges are clarified via her horror—that would be too easy. More interesting is the way in which Sasha, whose dialogue with her hyper-intelligent and overanxious child is characterized by a self-awareness that borders on clinical, comes to recognize the fundamental impossibility of her fantastical attempt to keep her lover separate—to understand their affair as an unstoppable force that just happened to happen—and her simultaneous powerlessness to the appeal of such an attempt. “You don’t exactly think we’re safe,” her daughter says, the gifted interlocutor obsessed with dinosaurs and extinction. Sasha responds:

We do our best.” Our best?—a bald lie or the best kind of truth? We hold hands crossing the street. Wear our bike helmets, seatbelts. Avoid the rip tide, shutter up and evacuate in hurricane weather. Draw charts, graphs, and erect whole meteorological stations to keep measure of all inclement or advancing forces. Still we fuck up. In full sight of the right choice, we fuck up. And usually...

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