Rebecca Schiff

One professional reviewer assumes that the author's actual voice is fused to the first-person voices in these texts. That is, Rebecca Schiff is speaking these stories as if there are no created personas distant from the author.
On the contrary, I sense a significant gulf between the author and the created speakers in these stories. There are numerous spiritual references sprinkled throughout this interesting collection, and the narrators are deeply alienated from any sort of healthy theology of the body. There is no genuine love, no romantic sensuality, no emotional connection; there are certainly no echoes of Walt Whitman's singing of the body electric (where, "If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred") in these stories; instead, Schiff masterfully immerses us in the numb sterility of hookup culture.
I read these stories as cautionary landscapes (perhaps with the ecstatic Hasidic affirmation of love and family as silent contrasting context in the background?). For example, there is nothing titillating about the description of de-spiritualized sex in "Third Person," where we read, "she forgot all the sex she had as soon as she had it, she didn't really have it when she had it" (53). Similarly, in "Little Girl," the narrator describes the rapid-fire hookup lifestyle of a young woman responding to random male invitations. When she arrives, "Some of the buildings had elevators and she enjoyed the anticipation on the ride up, the soreness on the ride down. What happened in between almost didn't happen." And on the same page we learn that "[her] body acted the same no matter who touched her" (120).
Any comedy here is dark and nervous. These sexual encounters sound like the dissatisfying buzzes of addicts whose nerves are shot and they're ready to crumble. Most of the negative elements noted by some reviewers, in my view, are intentional and integral to Schiff's striking sketches of this emotionally blasted contemporary landscape.… (mehr)