What I mean is, when I look for innovation in fiction I want fiction, real fiction. As I say to my students straight out: It’s all about the story, stupid.

Well, don’t tell that to Alissa Nutting. She’s got “story” written in ink on every page of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, her lively, well-imagined, and jaw-droppingly smart prize-winning debut. I’ve got my work cut out for me trying to describe what you’ll get out of this collection: imagine Donald Barthelme writing smart feminine narratives, Mary Gaitskill sans the kinky sex, or Margaret Atwood turning to dry, Colbert-style humor, and you may start to get an idea of what to expect.

The stories in the collection live up to their title: women and girls hold jobs that definitely qualify as unclean. One is the boiled dinner for an obscure cannibalistic club, another is a porn starlet reality show host for an episode featuring anal sex on the moon, another is a child-actress-from-hell’s “adult zombie slave” television show sidekick. Each story catapults the reader into the wicked world of Nutting’s witty imagination, from a hell in which every damned frequents the same small bar that serves only non-alcoholic beer, to one where celebrities and rich people agree to turn their bodies into host environments for endangered species.

Yet, in spite of the sometimes impressionistic, sometimes realist, sometimes naïve-painting-inspired settings, the characters remain painfully familiar: a sister attempting to save her paraplegic brother from terminal depression, a transsexual attempting to hide her past from her boyfriend and from KKK bigots, a daughter trying to reconcile to her abusive mother, women coming to terms with infertility or with fatal diseases—and girls and women just trying to connect emotionally to the people in their lives.

I would abstain from labeling Nutting’s collection “women’s fiction” if it didn’t treat so heavily on the grotesque importance assigned to a woman’s beauty, and on the paradoxical conflicts and stupidities that such unreasonable demands create.

In “Model’s Assistant” for example, a party nerd is granted access to an elite night-clubbing society through her improbable friendship with a supermodel. The protagonist confesses, “Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.”

The party nerd’s life improvement reflects in the leftover attention that she can scrape from the model’s groupie followers. And when that friendship is threatened, the odd, unintelligible language the supermodel speaks takes an ominous turn: “Put you in tiny coffin,” says the supermodel when “breaking up” with the assistant, a poignant and telling variation from her earlier catch-phrase, “Special coffin.” The fact that Garla speaks no English and can only utter catch phrases that don’t always make sense (”Vodka, you know?”) is of no concern to the beautiful people who worship her.

In “Porn Star,” “Ant Colony,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend” the situation is reversed: women are trapped by their beauty and sexual drive, and are reduced and victimized by evil surgeons, cold-blooded Idol-style audiences and shrewish sisters with terminal cancer whose jealousy grows to appalling proportions. The beautiful protagonists of these stories are only partially aware of the potential dangers of the envy they attract: “I was very used to people feeling like they were more important then me, but less beautiful,” says the heroine of “Ant Colony.” “I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.”

Similarly, in “Band Leader’s Girlfriend,” the flighty Claudia/Sorcerella has trouble shaking off an overbearing sister who makes it a habit to call her and hang up on her, or call her and shout. “I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor,” ponders the overwhelmed narrator.

Alissa Nutting / photo from the author's website

Nutting is especially brilliant when revealing the dysfunctional layers of her characters’ otherwise glib and (mostly) carefree lives. The transsexual narrator in “She Man” reveals that a dog-murdering pimp is blackmailing her, this after a cheerful description of a perfectly ordinary and satisfying life as “queen of kitsch.” The relationship between the narrator of “Deliverywoman” and her online buddy, FluidTransfer69, echoes the usual she said/he said disconnection of casual cybersex partners that happens when one takes the other more seriously than the situation warrants. But this otherwise common scenario takes a turn for the morbid when the narrator reveals that her mother, convicted for murdering her father, was preserved cryogenically and her body is up for sale on a futuristic e-Bay style auction house.

Unclean Jobs harnesses this type of Jerry Springer drama to bring humor and postmodern insights to these action-packed short stories. You can spend the time chuckling as you turn the page, or you can ponder the prophetic vision of the near future that this collection delivers. Either way, reading Alissa Nutting’s fiction more than satisfies.

Further Links and Resources

Alissa Nutting - photo from the author's website

To soothe and engage, Bitch decided to let readers vote on five books that would become an online YA book club. On the first Friday of each month, anyone could gather and discuss. Yours truly decided to take up the challenge. Reader, it wasn’t easy. As if the original list and its unceremonious alteration weren’t enough of a fiasco, Bitch first delayed the book club by a month, and then waited until after 2 pm EST to start the first discussion on April 1st (no joke), thus ensuring the smallest audience possible.

Some mitigating circumstances: Bitch is based on the west coast. They are a small organization with a correspondingly small staff. I applaud their mission, their dedication to providing an online space for discussing feminist issues, and their decision to start a YA book club. BUT. Two months (the time from the original melee to the initial book club post) is an eon in internet time. And people are really busy! So after the delay is it any surprise that the robust discussion in which I was hoping to engage…completely fizzled?

To their credit, Bitch assembled a panel of five people to frame and manage the discussion, and they seem, in this first book club outing, to be really smart and astute readers. It’s definitely worth visiting the site to read the initial Q & A about the first book club choice, Jackson Pearce’s Sisters Red.

Sisters Red has its roots in the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood—there’s a girl, and many wolves who threaten her. What’s different here is that the girl has a sister, and they both fight back. The book takes place in and around Atlanta, in a world not dissimilar from our own. When pretty girls go out at night, their beauty attracts the Fenris, wolves who devour them. They also attacked our heroines as children and Scarlett, the older and fiercer sister, lost an eye defending her younger sister Rosie. Now Scarlett is obsessed with hunting the Fenris, and her bloody encounters with the man-wolves have left her body covered with scars.

As a feminist text, I found Sisters Red both interesting and deeply problematic, for many of the same reasons the panel over at Bitch discusses. The novel portrays Scarlett and Rosie as taking control of their own destiny and kicking ass. So far so good. But Scarlett is physically punished every time she fights. Large portions of the plot revolve around Silas, a male love interest who the sisters let separate them, and who, as a character, is kind of boring. The Fenris are attracted by women’s sexuality, and their attacks are silent code for sexual assaults—this aspect of the book is its weakest, but raises an important question about the Bitch list: ought it only to contain books with completely positive messages about women (is there such a book?) or does a book that tries (and perhaps fails) to address feminist issues that are important to discuss suitable for this list as well?

Only once before have I been part of a book club. I don’t remember if it was during the second year of my MFA or just afterward; what I do remember is that we read and violently disagreed about Jim Crace’s Being Dead, and then broke up after more than half the group refused to spend a good chunk of the summer reading Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Being smart-mouthed, newly-minted MFAs, we were probably bound to disagree about almost anything. I’m not sure if it’s lack of time, community, or my own snobbishness about my reading list that has kept me from joining a book club since, but I was excited about a feminist YA lit one.

Books have the power to make us see the world differently. By telling stories, fiction gives us the opportunity to engage with situations, relationships, and concepts with which we may already be familiar, or which may be entirely foreign to us. There is no better time for this engagement, which is for many people potentially life-shaping and transformative, than adolescence. This is why the ill-named and ill-defined genre of young adult literature is so compelling to me, and, although boys certainly have their problems too, there’s no more vulnerable group of adolescents than girls. And yet Twilight, a decidedly inferior series in both the arenas of good writing and of feminist motivations, is still ascendant. Clearly, a feminist YA book club is a great idea. Maybe next month the discussion over at Bitch’s “From the Library” blog will take off. If it does, I’ll be there.

In the meantime, if anyone’s interested in talking about what makes a great feminist young adult novel, leave a comment here! I’d love to continue the discussion.

And here are some other places where interesting YA discussions are happening:

In a comment now buried the magazine stated: “We’ve decided to remove these books from the list — Sisters Red because of the victim-blaming scene that was discussed earlier in this post, Tender Morsels because of the way that the book validates (by failing to critique or discuss) characters who use rape as an act of vengeance, and Living Dead Girl because of its triggering nature.” You can read a summary of the controversy over at “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books,” which points out that any feminist book list published online is going to attract some comments. After Bitch removed the books from the list, many commenters accused them of pandering to criticism and some authors, Scott Westerfeld among them, asked to be removed from the list in solidarity. In an effort to undo the damage, Bitch issued this statement, and is starting an online book club. Readers can choose five titles to read and discuss online, and the ten books readers can vote on include the books they removed. The magazine has not, however, apologized for changing their minds about those books, or for publishing an original list that it seems they didn’t research very well, at least not to their own satisfaction.

I originally wrote a post praising the creation of the first version of the list, and then when the debacle erupted, held back that post to see how the digital brawl developed. One interesting aspect of that waiting was reading the numerous calls for Bitch to recant, restore the books immediately, and otherwise be ashamed of themselves. In reading their latest statement I was struck by two things: first, it’s much more considered than their original response, and is trying to start a real conversation, not to end one–which takes time. In the flash-bang culture of the web, it’s often easy to forget that stepping back and waiting a few days is usually a better response than instant action. Second, I was reminded that the staff of Bitch is very small, and that they are probably overwhelmed by work like the rest of us. Although an apology would not have gone amiss, and I’m not sure why they thought taking on the creation of a list of 100 books was a good idea given that they clearly didn’t have time to actually read some of their own selections, I can appreciate the attempt to change this online fight into a more positive online community activity.

With that in mind, I’m joining the book club. In later posts I’ll report back on just how feminist I think these titles are, and on whether it’s possible to have a productive online discussion about such controversial subjects. I’d like to believe that’s not a foregone conclusion. And if you enjoy YA literature, I invite you to join me. Vote on the book club selections yourself, and then watch this space for a discussion of the books, and of the debate about them.

The online version (along with a slideshow of images from the store) is available at no cost on P&W’s website…but if you want a print copy, Poets & Writers‘ special offer to Fiction Writers Review readers (only $12 for a year-long subscription) is still up for grabs; if you order through this page before May 15, you’ll get the current issue featuring Women & Children First. Regardless of when you order, a subscription will show support for independent bookstores everywhere.

Here’s an excerpt from Jeremiah’s Women & Children First profile:

photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

When I walked into Women & Children First, the feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding feeling I experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books stacked on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the handwritten recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves, everything feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.

And here’s Linda Bubon, on her (and the bookstore’s) future:

Linda Bubon / photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist bookseller. Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer viable?” And I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a general bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist reading series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my life is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about their lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and women’s lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we take the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we’re discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these things. Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not stopped. We don’t have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we did.

The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.