In 'Creatures,' surreal worlds, random delights
Willful Creatures: Stories
By Aimee Bender
Doubleday, 208 pp., $22.95
If you're ever in danger of forgetting the magical violence of fairy tales, Aimee Bender's fictional mayhem will drive that point home with a sequined stiletto. Stripped of excess and outright emotion, her writing is tough, sometimes kooky, and scarily precise; she can evoke a scene of great tenderness with allegory alone, like the pumpkin-headed couple who give birth to an iron-headed child. Hers is a world of algebraic, childlike dazzle where everything -- object, feeling, national phenomenon -- has its correlative: Not only might the toad be a prince, but an integer is a mood state, a noun is a 3-D art object, a salt shaker is a marriage (gone wrong, as it turns out). The effect upon the reader is both gradual and complex: a grasp toward the known world disappearing in the rearview mirror, the necessary suspension of disbelief, an eventual realm of cockeyed order and delight. Gabriel Garcia Marquez once famously explained the credibility of magical realism by referring to the priest in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude" who levitates each time he drinks a cup of hot chocolate: It's the chocolate, Garcia Marquez said, that makes the levitation real. In Bender's world, the opposite holds true: Her scaffoldings of unreality are there to hold the humanity within the story.
In her 2000 novel, ''An Invisible Sign of My Own," Bender used the elegant metaphor of mathematics to contain the chaos and grief of a girl losing her father. The stories in ''Willful Creatures" possess a similar arc of purpose, but the collection is uneven -- it's difficult to maintain this much fantastical bait-and-switch when you don't have a sustaining character to tether the magic. The levitating priest keeps changing hats, in other words, so one is sometimes more aware of the props on stage than the reason for their being there. The greatest successes in the collection are what underscore the gauziness of their slighter counterparts. ''Fruit and Words," for instance, is a marvelous left turn in the desert, from a relationship gone sour in Las Vegas to a road stand where a strange woman is selling exotic fruit. The fruit is a mere cover for the words she has on display in the back of the store, and this discovery transforms the story into something alternately enchanting and terrifying. ''End of the Line," on the other hand, is even more fantastic but less commanding. Bender creates a Lilliputian world in which an unhappy man procures a little man-pet from the local pet store; the giant-size fellow, we soon realize, is far more prone to human miseries and cruelties than his miniature captive. The story pulls at the worst strings of sentimentality and then becomes instructive -- it's endearing, but not in a way that leaves you admiring a day later.
So the realistic stories, when they appear, can be something of a relief. Two of the best stories in the collection are ''Off" and ''Debbieland," each capturing the interior bedlam of a female protagonist who acts out her troubles on the world around her. ''Off" is a feat of voice, the narrative of a trust-fund troublemaker who uses up people like Kleenex, trying to stave off her own wretchedness. The first-person-plural narration of ''Debbieland" is a wry, authorial ''we" that seems half-mythic and half-psychotic: The narrator remembers tormenting a classmate with the meanness peculiar to teenage girls, only to suffer a similar fate years later, when she grows up enough to bare her own heart. It's a story awful and haunting at once -- a little like ''The Virgin Suicides" meets ''Heathers."
''Death Watch," a laconic litany of medical patients who were given faulty terminal diagnoses, delivers a shorthand version of hope and fatalism run awry because of human error. ''The Meeting" is another story about the cost of expectations, with a man nearly missing out on love because it arrives wearing a different cloak from what he had envisioned. Bender's titles are usually instructive, if heavy-handed. One of the most elaborate stories here is ''Dearth," wherein a woman wakes each day to find a group of seven potatoes who want to adopt her as stand-in mom. Her eventual embrace of their rough affection will open her up to the world around her, and bring her a memory of nurturance too long buried.
In any genre that breaks the confines of realism, one of the litmus tests is whether the world created is a self-contained technical triumph. Mostly Bender's are, though she gets into trouble with tangible details like potatoes trying to eat popcorn (no potato mouths). But the larger question is whether such a reality accomplishes anything above and beyond extraordinariness -- whether that priest's levitation, say, actually gives us something we needed that couldn't have been accomplished with an earthbound flight of fancy. That test is not always met with the fanciful interlopers in ''Willful Creatures" -- the boys with iron heads, the tiny men-pets, the stubborn potatoes. Does being a candidate for a future in french fries really render you more human than an ordinary child? Bender can't be accused of being cutesy; her stories are too dark for that. But cleverness abounds in ''Willful Creatures," and cleverness, with no other end in sight, is a pretty short street.
Some of the problem is the repetition of the fantastic device: Even when the stories are arresting, they start to wear on you, and I couldn't help feeling a sort of authorial self-amusement behind all the invention. Bender's last two stories are free of this constraint. ''The Leading Man," about a boy with keys for fingers, concerns a child trying to unlock the mysteries of his father's war trauma, and that sorrow is handled deftly and provocatively. ''Hymn" is a brief, scattershot homage to Bender's very gift: the ability to find discrete objects and emotions in transient forms or in their own opposites, the blessed connectedness of the world beyond what we think we see. ''Willful Creatures" is half doodling and half treasure, but I suspect the mind that invented these stories could travel more widely in earthbound spheres.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 
