The Withdrawal MethodPasha MallaSoft Skull Press |
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Reviewed by Jill Meyers
"Big City Girls," my favorite story in Pasha Malla’s debut collection The Withdrawal Method, draws together a group of fifth-grade girls led by Ginny and accompanied by her seven-year-old boy, Alex. At home on a snow day, Ginny and her friends build a snow fort, botch a game of Clue, and concoct a scenario of adult fun in New York City, bossing Alex around all the while. Shayna, the mean girl of the group, determines that rape is a necessary ingredient of their New York fantasy, and selects Alex to be the rapist. When it is Shayna’s turn to be “raped” in the coat closet, things do not go according to plan, and Alex is cast out of their playgroup and locked in his room upstairs, shaken and troubled and a little sick. Despite this disturbing turn, the story manages to double back toward innocence in its final image, where Alex watches the girls making snow angels. Malla’s best stories often perform this type of trick, holding contradictory notions against one another: wryness and beauty, inevitability and strangeness, worldliness and purity.
In Malla’s stories, the reader is likely to find danger where adult and child worlds collide: In one story, a girl catches her father masturbating to porn, while in another, hospitalized children watch horrified as a bonobo mounts a goat. Children wander into adult situations, or else adults put themselves at risk by reaching out to children. It's in these moments that the stories can either open up into a new savage vein or else sidestep into surprising tenderness.
The Withdrawal Method moves rather capriciously between styles. A longer piece of uncanny, jokey historical fiction about a chess-playing automaton (“the Turk”) exists beside both a resonant short about an exchange between Jacques Cousteau and Picasso and the more McSweeney’s-esque “The Film We Made about Dads.”
One of Malla’s more successful experiments with form is the collection’s inventive first story, “The Slough,” which takes place in two sections. The first half concerns an unnamed couple whose relationship has more or less ended, though they continue to live together in resentment and confusion. The girlfriend has been applying a body cream that will cause her to shed all her skin at once. “People’s skin cells rejuvenate every seven years,” she says casually. “Usually it’s gradual, but I’ve been using something to make it happen all in one go.” The boyfriend, awestruck, seeks to find out what will happen to her and her shed skin (“Are you going to press it like a dried flower or something?”), and even attempts to join in with his own body experiment. Despite the boyfriend's attempts, the girlfriend distances herself at every opportunity, until one night she disappears. Then the story itself molts. The second section begins with a girl named Lee in the hospital, bald from chemo, with melanoma that has metastasized to her brain. She has three months to live. Her boyfriend drifts in and out of her room, unable to drum up any compassion. The relationship has more or less ended some time ago. The second half of the “The Slough,” as it turns out, is about much the same thing as the first, although the events of the first half are now refracted, shifted, changed. As in Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, meaning accrues and deepens around these repetitions, these variations.
In "Respite," Womack, a writer and something of a schmuck, volunteers taking care of a boy once a week. The boy is dying of a degenerative illness, and is blind, deaf, and mute; he can no longer walk, and so Womack carries him through the house:
What the boy likes is doors. He and Womack stop in front of a closed door in the house, a bedroom or a closet, and the boy takes Womack’s hand and places it on the doorknob, and Womack opens the door and the boy laughs. When Womack closes the door the boy moans and takes Womack’s hand again and places it on the doorknob, and this continues until the boy becomes restless, and they move to a new door in the house.
In The Withdrawal Method, characters are looking for exit strategies, for ways out of bad relationships, dead-end jobs and depressed towns, lawsuits, mourning. As they fumble toward answers and means of withdrawal, they also withdraw into themselves. Many stories end with characters alone: writing in journals, leaving parties, staring down at four girls on their backs in the snow. They are sad, even ridiculous, down on their luck, disillusioned and a bit broken, but in the clutch of hope. These are all fine endings, well constructed and poignant, but the above scene from “Respite” has even more staying power, because it is so full of pathos and delight, and also because, unlike many of Malla’s stories, it brings two people together to accomplish a common mission. Here is an entrance strategy that is both a little slapstick and a little strange. Here is something to strive for.