Cris Mazza

This is an entertaining and interesting novel with a multiplicity of story levels and timelines. Tam, recently retired from her job as a financial analyst, and more than a little at loose ends, goes off to the coast of Maine, and one particular lighthouse, to do some research for her younger sister, who is researching the family tree. Tam's own life story is told in flashback form, as we learn of her relations with her siblings (especially her troublesome brother) and her mother, and the effects of her epilepsy, which had necessitated her giving up her life's true passion: competitive swimming. In the meantime, Tam is at first researching, but soon spinning stories in her head about, the histories of the family, somehow her own forebears, who had run this lighthouse for decades over a century before. Plus there are entanglements, romantic and otherwise, as she begins meeting people in the town. Some of the parallels between the historic stories Tam is inventing/discovering and the happenstances her "present day" experiences seem a bit forced and a little less graceful than we might like, and there are some bits of information about her own family that come very late, but overall the various threads are woven together skillfully, and the writing is crisp, and the descriptions of experience and of nature are delivered without a heavy hand.

Looking up Mazza online, I was intrigued to learn that she was one of two editors of a particular anthology who coined the term "chick lit." Mazza meant the term ironically, but it got co-opted by publishers who applied it to just the sort of writing that Mazza meant to be criticizing.… (más)

What’s amazing about this book is that Mazza can unfold such a tiny piece of the world into such an interesting shape.

Her characters aren’t talking politics in Madrid, they’re not having epiphanies in the desert, and they’re not redefining cyberspace. They’re small women in a small part of the world, doing an insignificant job, governed by an insignificant boss, serving people who can’t respond. Instead of choosing, for her subject, people who usually find themselves being written about (those who are categorically superlative in some way – hidden or otherwise) she chooses two minimum wage nurse’s aides in a hospital for the severely disabled. Mazza doesn’t glorify these lives –she doesn’t give them secret insights or hidden depths. They remain, outside the book, invisible. They do not articulate their own ideas about their lives or their problems. They do not triumph and they are not destroyed. What's superlative about these women emerges in a small flower for a short time, and then fades. But it emerges in excrutiating clarity.

Part of the fascination of reading _Disability_ is in seeing “behind the scenes” in an unfamiliar setting – in this case the hospital, where the children have names like “Boardboy” and “Scooterboy” and the characters detail their experiences with the work. The administration is predictably idiotic, prescribing hearing therapy for deaf patients, and most of the aides are lazy and neglectful. This book, however, is not about how severely disabled people are treated in state hospitals. The book is about taking two women, really any women, *any women at all*, and finding a story in them, finding “enough” for a novel – proving them “worthy” of having a book written about them. It’s about taking up a hypothetical challenge – I dare you to write a book about *these two souls* and doing it in a way that had me turning pages intensely and reading at stop lights.

It may surprise you that the book is so compelling, given its small and honest scope, its lack of irony or plot twists. This is a story about women, told by a woman as only a woman could truly tell it. I think it’s exactly what we heard about in “A Room of One’s Own” – who cares about what the Prime Minister is doing – we want to hear about the girl behind the counter at the hat store. I think Virgnia Woolf would be very proud.… (más)

Easily one of the strangest novels I've read. Brian Leonard--a champion marksman, a biologist, and a pilot--is doing fieldwork, studying the movement of a group of cougars transplanted from suburban California and into Wyoming ranchlands. Brian is a strange guy, a 40-year old virgin with no emotional involvement of any kind with another human being. That in itself is not so strange, but rather the reason he became such a man is strange. When he was 13 he was masturbating while his lesbian sister and mother were arguing. He did this often, and got a charge from it. His mother would try to "cure" Diana by bringing men home to seduce her, and teenage Brian would jerk off listening to this regularly. On this particular occasion, his orgasm was perfectly timed with the self-inflicted gunshot that killed his sister. As a result Brian fears he's a potential sexual killer, and sublimates all emotional and physical desire into his marksmanship training.

Now, doing his cougar fieldwork, Brian is so desperately lonely that he decides to test himself by hiring a young woman to assist him. He teaches Leya how to fly a helicopter so she can steer while he shoots coyotes for money and tracks radio collars of big cats. She's your stereotypical tree-hugger lefty and can't abide what he does to pay her salary, but also she's been shabbily treated by her ex-husband and needs the work and companionship herself. Much of the book features her trying to get Brian to open up emotionally. He shoots things instead and refuses because he doesn't want to find out he can't get it up without shooting her. The give-and-take between frigid naive Leya and ultra-repressed Brian is terribly frustrating, but their exaggerated situations are not dissimilar to the problems apparent in many hetero relationships, which is one of the themes of this complex little book. Meanwhile cougars and coyotes prowl and mate and destroy foals without getting all worked up about it, and there's some intrigue with a local rancher who threatens violence if Brian doesn't help with an insurance scam, and the entire fraudulent give-and-take of polite sexuality is critiqued and ultimately exposed as a lame sort of capitalism. Because our sexual expectations and indoctrinations are so flawed, because of our complete sexual dishonesty, violence is practically inevitable between the sexes who otherwise fail utterly to communicate.

The author, Chris Mazza, is a post-feminist feminist according to her biography, and she has edited a series of books entitled Chick Lit. There's so much going on in Girl Beside Him that I'll certainly be reading more of her stuff.… (más)