Jami Attenberg - 'The Melting Season'

I feel conflicted. Not about the book. I liked the book. Attenberg is a great writer and I was engaged in this story all throughout.

I'm conflicted because it was a good book and I don't know why. Which is a good and bad thing. It's good, for Attenberg, because it means she writes so naturally and effortlessly that its just second nature for her to create a unique work of narrative fiction (which is not to say this required no effort; I know that's not true for any writer). It's a bad thing, for Attenberg, because I wasn't stirred as much as I'd hoped to be.

It's a good thing, for the reader, because it's an effortless read. You can fly through this thing, not being able to turn the page fast enough. It's a bad thing, for the reader, because you're not sure how to describe why this is so good.

The story involves a woman, Catherine, who is running away from home in Nebraska. She took all her husband's money, over six figures, and is driving, and eventually hits Vegas. Her marriage was falling apart (not just because her husband has a really small dick), her life itself was falling apart. Her little sister, a teenager, is pregnant, and her alcoholic mother beats on her all the time. Sheltered Midwest people living sheltered Midwest lives (Catherine comments more than once about how her family is trailer trash). But they have complex feelings and complex relationships that inform their complex feelings and cannot be reduced to issues such as pregnancy, or alcoholism, or domestic abuse, without taking into consideration the whole story.

Primarily, this is a story about being a woman and relationships to other women. How Catherine talks to a perfect stranger/new BFF in Vegas, Valka. How she talks to her mother. How she talks to her sister. But also how she talks to men. And how men treat her. Trying to take advantage of her when she's drunk, when she's at a bar, when her husband leaves her in a parking lot outside a sex shop and truckers think she's a prostitute.

It's a story about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. Attenberg is quite cheeky that the most sage like character is a Prince impersonator transitioning from woman to man. Her transition is physical while everyone else is trying to transition emotionally.

It's a story about who we let into our lives and into ourselves, literally in the case of Catherine, and the dark secrets her mom told her that started the trouble with her marriage in the first place.

So maybe there's more to say about the story than I had originally thought. Maybe I was just a bad reader and needed to mark more in this book to go back to. Here's another thing that's good for Attenberg: I want to read more of her work. And not just because she's from Chicago.