instant unlove

Attenberg has these great, pithy moments in which she captures exactly what it is to feel a certain way. I admire that this book isn't afraid of being direct, of coming out an saying what it wants to say. I tend to try to hint and suggest too much, and it's good to remember that as a reader it's often very satisfying when the writer just pinpoints something so directly. As in, "On the one hand, I would love to have children. On the other hand, then I would have children. That part I wasn't so sure about." It's funny because it's true! Har.

One of the things this book does the best, I think, is to capture what it is like to fall out of love with someone. The first story, "The Perfect Triangle," the strongest in the bunch, for my money, paints a funny and sad and true picture of teenage love. And "Mean Bone" deals with a woman finally getting fed up with her husband (who she never was really in love with to begin with): "Maggie stares at him. Lately, each time he opens his mouth he makes her love him less and less. She is trying to decide if he is doing this on purpose or if she is just now realizing for the first time how much he sucks." And: "You're mean, says Robert. Only sometimes, says Maggie. And only a little part of me. Let me introduce you, she thinks. Here I am."

Then there's "Island Fever." "...my marriage to Will was distintergrating into tiny pieces. I had first started noticing the pieces after an enormous fight, when he told me, 'I can see now how someone could hate you.' Bam! It was like confetti shot out of a toy gun. The pieces started high in the air, spiraled around our eyes and lips and hands, and finally landed at out feet, covering the carpeting of out home. We would try so hard not to step on those pieces." It's almost a Lorrie Moore kind of moment -- the lightheartdness used to express the deep, deep sadness. There is something interesting about the moldering relationships in these stories. Instant Love is only part of it. These stories are more about the other end -- the instant rotting of that momentary love. In the story "Island Fever, the narrator goes away for a weekend, knowing that her husband will move out in her absence. She takes their truck, leaving him the smaller car, to make his move more difficult. But when she gets back and sees that yes, in fact, he's gone, without a note or a word, she immediately regrets having taken the truck -- because of her moment of spite, she is now stuck with the wrong vehicle for her new life. It's a great detail, and a good, sad story. The truths about relationships feel stingingly real. I hear Attenberg's publishing a novel this year -- I'll have to check it out.