Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
The epigraph to Sydney Rende’s debut collection of short stories is a quote from Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should A Person Be? “How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity.” The quote provides some sense of what motivates Rende’s characters, who want to either be famous or get proximate enough to someone who is famous for some of fame’s specialness to rub off.
The protagonist of “Nothing Special” wants to meet an actor named Arlo Banks, once a teen heartthrob but now a fading star. Dismayed that Banks fails to respond to her unsolicited email, the protagonist nonetheless remains convinced that she’s more invested in Banks than she is with her current boyfriend. Perhaps she’s delusional — a trait shared by several of Rende’s characters. She thinks she could love her boyfriend, in a pinch maybe, but also thinks his death would bring a sense of relief. Boyfriends and male love interests in this collection are typically self-centered, clueless, and unsatisfactory in one way or another; Arlo Banks, the fading teen star, appears in three of the stories.
Quirks and eccentricities, anxiety and self-doubt abound here. In “Smart Girl” a female college student worries that her hormones “will develop the temperament of a bad dog — that I’ll wake up one day and my body will be gnawed to shreds, unrecognizable.” Her parents sent her to college with a giant box of condoms purchased at Costco. “Maybe you’ll meet a boy,” her mother says. She goes to a party with a boy who asks her for oral sex. While she’s working down there, she struggles to remember the boy’s name, though she’s sure it’s one that can be said with a clenched jaw. A bit later, she’s shoving condoms under the doors of every room of her dorm floor. They remind her of packets of soy sauce.
Rende has a knack for conveying ribald humor. She writes her characters into uncomfortable and terribly awkward situations. An assistant on a show that showcases celebrity homes, whose main job is to make sure nobody on the crew goes thirsty, suddenly begins stealing stuff from the stars — eggs from Margot Robbie’s chicken coop, peacock feathers from Blake Lively’s dining room, aromatic oils from Alicia Keys. Finally, she’s poised to steal a ham — yes, a ham — from Arlo Banks. Mortifying and comical.
The dialogue is snappy and propulsive and these stories have a fluidity and contemporary quality, a fleetingness characteristic of our time. Not surprisingly, celebrity is rarely as glamorous as it appears once the superficial cladding is removed. Although this collection is centered on women of a certain age, the arc of Arlo Banks, swinging from teen heartthrob to post-fame confusion and loneliness, provides a thematic impetus. The desire to be seen and recognized all too often comes with a cost.
