Jenny and the Jaws of Life

TITLE: Jenny and the Jaws of Life

AUTHOR: Jincy Willett

CATEGORY: Short Story / Fiction

It's oddly comforting for a young writer to hear a story like Jincy Willett's. Comforting or depressing, depending on how you define success. Here's this woman, who in 1987, at 40, published her first book of short stories, a blackly comic, deeply moving, utterly brilliant book. A collection so good that she might've called that writing thing mastered, and moved to take up stamp collecting. It was critically praised but never caught on (this happens sometimes) and went out of print, this incredible achievement doomed to obscurity. But as it happens, one of the people who did read it in the late 80s was David Sedaris, who more or less single handedly brought it back from the dead. It's a nice story, if you're interested.

The book was re-released in anticipation of her novel, which is when I came across it. Willett has an incredible command of the English language, and the ability to write things that are so sad and yet so funny at the same time. Sedaris, in the forward, calls it "the funniest book of stories I've ever read," but it's not funny the way his stories are. Not Ha-Ha funny (though it can be). It's not just dark humor, it's black humor, coal black, but in the depths of depression, patricide, rape, etc., she avoids the easy abstraction of maudlin hope and finds a shorter route to humor than you knew was there.

"Best of Betty" is her most conventionally funny, the slow unraveling of an advice columnist told exclusively in letters. "Julie in the Funhouse" is the first story, a man whose sister has been killed by her own children, a trip through siblings and relationships and the truth that by the time we realize what time is taking from us, it's already too late. "Under the Bed," a first person story of a woman who was raped, and feels as though she's the only one dealing with it logically. "The Haunting of the Lindguards," a story, both painful and hilarious, of an apparent hairline fracture in a relationship turning out to be a fault line.

It goes on and on. It's hard not to love her protagonists. Because of their faults as much as despite them. She writes women particularly well, and through her considerable control of language, can create not just a character's tics, or speaking style, or desires, but their whole inner world. It's remarkable.

It sags a little bit in the middle, I think, with "Father of Invention" and "My Father at the Wheel," but it comes back with "Anticipatory Grief" and grips you until the end. They're the type of stories that you can't really read one after another, you finish one and you need to put it down for a while, think about it, mull over it. Days, these things stay with you. I haven't read the book in a year, and I am still visited by "Resume" or "Under the Bed" or "The Jaws of Life." It's that good.

So yes. Read this book.