Jennifer Bannan's short story collection "Inventing Victor" is mercilessly funny domestic comedy so biting that it is sometimes difficult to laugh along with her. In the title story, an adolescent Cuban-American girl invents an imaginary lover. In writing about this common teenage manipulation she displays an honesty as sensitive as it is intense.
Review by Jules Siegel published in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Nov. 9, 2003
"My parents were strict, overbearing, old-fashioned Cubans who wouldn't let me date without a chaperone," confesses Dacia, the girl who invents the lover to impress her popular and attractive friend, Minita. "I chose not to date, rather than risk that embarrassment," she confides bravely, and then hits you with a sucker punch: "It wasn't like there was a demand for me in the junior-high dating world. I was ugly."
"B&B" begins with simple sentences that sum up the argument of her story and -- this is really not too grandiose a judgment --- one of her generation's central dilemmas: "Because Catherine and John were liberals living in Pittsburgh, a segregated town with known race problems, they were committed to living in one of the few racially mixed neighborhoods. Their pride in this decision became a subtext in their lives." Unfortunately, their black neighbors do not respond very well to their humble attempts at integration. "I'm not really supposed to talk to white people," a school-aged girl tells John, who has been trying to build rapport with her.
Catherine suffers a "nagging sensation that she was missing something deep and meaningful by knowing only people like herself." When she and John vacation in Virginia Beach, it seems as if her fantasies are going to be fulfilled. An upper middle class black couple are staying at the bed and breakfast, too. In this subtle yet complex story, racial differences are trumped by social similarities, as the two couples find that similarities divide them from each other more than differences.
"Some white people, they want to take the diversity thing a little too far," Simone tells Catherine. "They want representatives of the hood; they don't want middle class blacks to be their black friends."
"B&B" is, by far, the star of this ruthlessly revealing collection. The other stories are accomplished enough, but at times the author tends to reach too far in burlesqueing the idiocies of the publicity business and other middle class foibles. Nonetheless, a promotion campaign based on how urine smells after one eats asparagus might provoke a wry chuckle or two among readers who've worked on the inside of any agency or corporate public relations department.
It's easy to forgive Jennifer Bannan's excesses because she writes so clearly and eloquently about the daily frustrations and thrills of ordinary life that too many writers ignore in their quest for existential meaning. This is not someone who is interested in the Big Picture except by inference. Yet when she is at the top of her form, her stories take on very significant implications, indeed.
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