Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
My rating: 4/5 cats
i am so glad i read Tampa before reading this one. because while this was good, i think that the stories are better individually than as a collection. there are only a couple that were standouts to my particular tastes, although i am finding that flipping through them now, a week later, to refresh the old memory, i am nodding and thinking, “oh, yeah, that one was pretty cool,” whereas reading them in one gulp, i kept scratching my head over why this book was such the darling of the goodreaders a while back.
it’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it sometimes goes a little deeper into the strained poetic grotesquerie than i can appreciate. and while i love my grotesquerie, i felt this one was a little arty for me.
but Tampa, while it is about such grotesque subject matter, is artistic rather than arty, if that makes sense to anyone besides me, and i don’t know that i would have rushed to read it if i had read this one first, because i am lukewarm with a creeper-appreciation of this collection. she has become more accomplished as a writer, more intense, more heartbreaking and perverse with a real capacity for character complexity.
there are some great ideas here. they are mostly stories of characters striving for human connection, for acceptance, for love, for glory, while the world bitch-slaps them with “oh no, not for you.”
She-Man is particularly strong, and one in which you can see the glimmers of her capacity with solid sympathetic characters. the ending is a little “look what i am doing!,” and my initial response was “no,” but then the final sentence is so perfect and wry that it gentled me into “yes.”
i also liked Model’s Assistant, with its display of subservience and puppy-doggy pandering and self-debasement just to be close to a shiny empty person, by a not-so-shiny empty person. as a character study, i thought it was really lovely-bleak.
Alcoholic is another pretty perfect story. pathetic and horrifying, yes, but very tightly controlled—a huge story is told in two pages, which is very impressive.
also in this category of short-but-killer is The Cat-Owner. i don’t even know what to say about this one. it’s very naked and raw and sad, to me, but also kind of funny. i’m not even sure what is the appropriate emotional response…
those are my favorite pieces, and i think if i were to go back and reread the other stories over a longer period of time and put some space between them, i might like them a little bit more.
i am rounding up the three and a half i feel into a four, because i think i am an outlier in my low-gush response, and i don’t want to discourage anyone from reading this just because i am not a cool kid.
but definitely read Tampa. it kicked my ass.
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