Aimee Bender’s’ books are impossible to find. Well, not quite impossible; I found this one, right? Next to impossible, then. I looked through every used bookstore in Toronto, and not a single copy of any of her books. Alright, I said to myself, I’ll bite the bullet and try to find her books new (I prefer to buy new books, but it’s been some time since my budget has allowed for that). I looked high and I looked low, and eventually I had to go to the The World’s Biggest Bookstore, where they had all of her works. I chose Willful Creatures, and here we are. What does it say about Bender that I had such difficulty finding her books? It’s not like I’d never heard of her. Aside from reading “The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers” in McSweeney’s I’ve actually found myself running across her name quite a bit in the last few years, in newspapers, podcasts, and interviews with other authors. People who know about up and coming writers know about Bender, so why don’t booksellers?
Willful Creatures is one of the most appropriate titles I’ve ever encountered for a collection of unlinked short fiction. All of these stories are strange, in their way (sometimes characters will be made of food, a detective pursues a trivial avenue of inquiry after a double murder, there is a world of tiny men existing below the larger world and sometimes its citizens are captured as pets), but each of her major characters acts in a way that can only be described as “willful”. Even when they are drunk or depressed or succumbing to a bundle of disorganized neuroses it is the strength of their wills that pushes the action forward. The direction they push the action is never consistent; the man who buys the tiny person as a pet is alternately caring and cruel, and the boy with keys for fingers, even when most lonely, never lets himself stop trying to open doors.
There are a number of blurbs on the cover and in the first few pages make much of Bender’s prose style, calling it “musical”, among other things. It is not musical. Not at all musical. In fact, it’s fairly standard pseudo-minimalist post-Hemingway formal American prose. That sounds like it’s a mouthful, but chances are good that if you’ve read anything by Raymond Carver or any of a hundred American writers of the last few decades you know exactly what I mean. It’s simple, clear, steady and robust. “Musical” is what critics with no ear and no imagination call any prose they happen to like.
Now I’m reading Slow Learner, by Thomas Pynchon.
