HOW TO WRESTLE A GIRL
Stories
By Venita Blackburn
Fiction writers who publish a story collection as one of their first two books follow a familiar track: novel then collection, or collection then novel. Uncommon is the writer who ignores this sequence to forgo the novel altogether, as it is perhaps our culture’s most anointed literary form. Yet Venita Blackburn dares to defy the norm, confidently following up her award-winning 2017 debut collection, “Black Jesus and Other Superheroes,” with “How to Wrestle a Girl,” a bold, witty, ominous and vulnerable second book of stories that is as resolute and original as its author.
These 30 offerings, many set in the author’s native Southern California, explore grief, the body, queerness and the political and societal forces that shape the lives of young women in particular. Some entries are only paragraphs long, but even then, from their opening lines, Blackburn’s assured prose and patterned cadences spark the characters and their voices to life, holding the reader hostage to the tales that unfold. “My lil sister / niece / granddaughter / baby cousin doesn’t know that she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time,” reads the first sentence of “Fam,” the collection’s two-page, single-paragraph opening story, about the self-validation a teenage girl receives from social media.
There are longer, meatier stories in the collection, but Blackburn’s economy of language is masterly. With detailed imagery, keen observation and an ability to subvert expectations, Blackburn commands the page in few words. Riding bikes home after jujitsu practice in “Halloween,” a chilling, four-page story first published in The New Yorker, the unnamed narrator and her friend Esperanza spot a dark green Honda, “like something nobody picks out for themselves but got because they thought it looked normal,” following a younger girl who is “small and thin like an uncooked pretzel.” Both reader and narrator soon realize, “Sometimes it’s the witnessing of a horror story that makes us forget we’re in one.” Blackburn swiftly conjures a cloud of dread as the two friends, themselves not much older or bigger than the girl, pedal desperately to rescue her from the suspicious car. As they know too well, “it takes a lot of people to protect one another, especially little girls.”
The collection is split into two parts, the second consisting of a string of linked stories that follow an unnamed Black queer high school girl. In one, she comes into a new awareness of the sordid behavior of the pastor who is sleeping with her mother. In another, she discovers that even a vacation in San Diego won’t save her family from its dysfunction. And in a third, she tells her coming-out story to the girl she has sexual dreams about, dreams that “ended like a dropped water balloon.” Together, the stories in this half offer a tapestry of one character’s experiences, within an inventive structure that varies in form, comprising straight narrative as well as grief logs, crossword puzzles and quizzes.
Though a few stories read more like fragmentary situations, “How to Wrestle a Girl” shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge our presumptions and dissect the beauty, danger and wonder of girlhood. In “Ambien and Brown Liquor,” the narrator eats at a Denny’s with her sister, T, at 3 a.m., after their mother has just attempted suicide. “The waitress was good,” Blackburn writes, after the girls have ordered. “Never asked us how we were doing, just punctuated all of her sentences with ‘sweetie.’” And that’s fine; neither the waitress nor the reader needs to ask; we already know how they’re doing. Because throughout this intimate collection, Blackburn renders her characters’ interiority artfully, with emotional precision — unearthing things we often leave unsaid. And we’re fortunate she does, because in the narrator’s words, “The most frightening things that eat up our lives can’t be seen.”
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September 06, 2021 at 04:00PM
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