November 10, 2014
Money and its mysteries—how to get it, keep it, steal it, and do without it—link the stories in this collection, but so do the mysteries of having children or being one. Bender’s youthful characters are imperious creatures who leave their parents bewildered, exhausted, and wrung out with love. Parenting, of course, is linked to money: only parents in the middle class—and Bender (A Town of Empty Rooms) makes it clear how tenuous that status is—notice when their children are “experimenting with disdain,” even if they don’t how to respond. (The poor are too busy; the rich have outsourced their child rearing.) Her characters struggle to identify the right thing to do, and wonder how to do it given dire circumstances. There are some astonishing characters in this collection—the elderly grifter in “Theft,” the ailing child in “Anything for Money,” and the sisters in “A Chick from My Dream Life”—but most of the stories are fairly low-key, taking up not the diagnosis but the wait for it, or the sudden anger at a neighbor’s child. And though readers may sometimes crave bigger or more conclusive endings, the stories’ strengths stem from Bender’s beautiful writing and her ability to convey the wonder and dread of ordinary life, the things we might notice—whether with terror or with joy—if we weren’t too busy worrying about paying the bills.
November 1, 2014
In these 13 stories, Bender (A Town of Empty Rooms, 2013, etc.) showcases families that "endure" in both senses of the word: suffer patiently and carry on despite enormous travail.The title story-concerning a sublet in Tribeca that goes horribly wrong for both the struggling couple renting it out and the woman who takes it beginning in September 2001-epitomizes the high anxiety that permeates Bender's stories. The New York setting is unusual, though. The book's landscape is mostly drab fast-food- and mall-saturated suburbia, often in Southern states where displaced northerners, usually Jewish, have arrived under financial duress. In "Free Lunch," two New Yorkers in North Carolina are as uncomfortable around a Hasidic rabbi and his wife as they are among their Christian neighbors; in "The Third Child," an overwhelmed mother, distraught to find herself pregnant again, nevertheless acts generously toward a neighbor child, only to be viciously snubbed by the girl's Baptist mother. Family and financial tensions often combine. In "For What Purpose?," a woman whose parents died in a car crash experiences a brief sense of belonging with work mates until she's let go. In both "What the Cat Said" and "This Cat," the family pet becomes the metaphor, or scapegoat, for disappointment and dysfunction. "Anything for Money" offers the book's only wealthy character, who becomes the most desperate when his daughter needs a new heart. The first two stories are among the least depressing. In "Reunion," a woman goes off the deep end, buying a phony beach lot from an old boyfriend, but her marriage survives. In "Theft," an aging scam artist and a jilted young woman forge a friendship that improves them both. And the volume's gentlest story, "The Sea Turtle Hospital," concerning a young teacher's kindness to a kindergartner, takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting. Although her tone can veer toward bitterness, Bender excels at characters on the edge of despair, particularly mothers who resent the children they love.
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January 1, 2015
Bender's (A Town of Empty Rooms, 2013) collection of stories appears to be about money, something we all need, work for, spend, misuse, even throw away. In Reunion, a woman is scammed out of money she can't afford to lose by an old high-school crush. In Anything for Money, a host of a game show on which people do crazy stunts for money finds himself doing anything he can to get his ailing daughter a heart transplant. And in the title story, a struggling couple sublet their apartment right before 9/11 and find that the woman who rented it is demanding more than just her deposit back. But Bender's stories are about more than money. She portrays people who are broken and asking themselves the same question in different waysam I worthy of being loved? Bender's tales are stark, heart wrenching, quirky, and sometimes end without closure. But they all work together, as Bender leads us to a unifying conclusion: you can't put a price on human life or love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)