Matt was kind enough to loan me his advance copy of Judy Budnitz’s new
collection of short stories. I’m posting below the review of it that I
wrote on Amazon:
Judy Budnitz dares make the genre of allegory palatable
again by stretching her metaphors to absurd lengths. In “Where we come from,” the
first in this excellent collection of short stories, a mother’s need to provide
the best for her son leads her to delay giving birth until he can be born in
the right place – and even then she can’t let go. Compared to this, the shenanigans
of parents trying to get children into “feeder” nursery schools seem downright
sane.The anxiety of motherhood runs through the best of the
stories in this collection. In addition to “Where we come from,” the teasingly titled
“miracle” (first published in The New Yorker) describes a situation in which
the normal ambivalence of new parents is magnified by a decidedly unusual
child.For Budnitz, motherhood is the flip side of daughterhood: “Where
we come from” starts with the mother as young daughter. “Flush,” perhaps the
best in the collection, is a straightforward, poignant story of the intertwined
fates of mothers and daughters, while “Visitors” examines the gap and
alienation (perhaps literally) between them. And “Motherland,” which begins as
a thought experiment about “an island of mothers,” suddenly transforms into an
evocative wish to transcend the roles we are assigned as daughters – and sons.The weakest stories in the collection explore the consequences
of motherhood gone wrong – the Big Spoiled American Baby. “Nadia” highlights the
ego- /ethno-centrism of the Baby when she’s all grown up, but it soon veers too
far into caricaturing the unsympathetic narrator. “Elephant and boy” suffers
from a similar weakness in exploring a similar theme. On the other hand, “Preparedness,”
featuring the President as Big Baby, successfully repackages tired hippie sentiments
into a gentle fairy tale.Not fitting neatly into any of the above categories are two
meditations on artistic endeavor: “The kindest cut,” which has a certain
old-world charm, and the melancholy “Saving face,” one of my favorites.Budnitz’s vivid imagination makes these stories fun to read,
but it’s her observations about the human condition – our vanity, our anxiety,
and also our morality – that make them worth reading.
Edit: I forgot to add that Matt’s blurb ended up on the front cover of the hardcover edition!
