The Porno Girl: and Other Stories

Rating:
Summary: Mothers, daughters, and wives... (3 1/2 stars)
Review: I have a tendency to gravitate toward novels/short stories where women are the main characters. I found the title and cover interesting not knowing how the inside would turn out. I liked a little less than half of the stories, while the other half I could discard.

One that stood out to me was the title story, "The Porno Girl." It was different not only because a woman visited a shop where you could watch peep show videos for a quarter, but while she watched, she had her baby "strapped to her chest."

Skip forward to "daughters." In this section, I was intriqued with the story "Waiting to Discover Electricity." A girl becomes involved with the dad of the children she babysits.

One of my favorites is "The Closet." It features two sisters and a mom trying to avoid the dad's visit. He arrives in a Hummer, speaks through a megaphone while standing barefoot and yelling, "Sound the alarm! All troops report to their stations! The mobilization has begun!" You don't have to read very far to figure out that something is seriously wrong with this man. Not only that, but what he did on the street toward the end shocked me.

The last story of the collection called, "Solomon and his Wives," caught my attention as a married woman of 5 years, more than befriends a man twice her age. It's not that I haven't read stories of this nature before, but those scenes were described in such a way that it pulled me in.

My favorite story of the book would be "Helen of Alexandria." A single woman is teaching at an all-girls school where many of the girls are from the "First Families of Virginia." This seems to make them feel privleged and they try to take advantage of the teacher, who is less privleged and somewhat shy. It reminded me how catty and dangerous girls and women can be, especially when they are in groups.

Even though I read quickly through the others, these stories mentioned had made me feel strange, and sometimes uncomfortable, but that's what I liked about them. They were realistic and not full of happy endings. I'm interested in this author's upcoming novel.

Rating:
Summary: Research through fiction
Review: I picked this book up for research purposes. Research through fiction.

Certain modern human truths reveal themselves most powerfully through fiction. You can tell clinical tales of tragedy, put things in case files, hear the traumas of your friends--but sometimes, the trials of life are best told through stories you can see from a detached but compelled perspective. Merin Wexler tells a few of these stories in "The Porno Girl".

The title short story is about a new mother who's found a postpartem outlet in the quarter booth porn shops that used to pepper Times Square. None of Wexler's characters are necessarily out of their element--they're all believeable tales. Her protagonists are women (almost) trapped in conventional roles, seeking outlets for things they don't understand about themselves. They're not "women in tragedy", but women leading out conventional struggles in unconventional ways. They're what's missing in the case files.

The stories themselves seem to lack a clear resolution--and that's what makes them believeable. One story chronicles a working mother's internal struggle of losing a daughter to a nanny. Another profiles a lonely teacher who has her datebook peeked through by a nasty student, and the names of dates (arranged through a dating service revealed) to a class of giggling girls. There's only one real stinker--all the rest seem to be well thought out stories of upper-middle-class women living in unusual situations that have become all too common.

The stories reminded me a bit of a theme I last read in "Use Me" by Elissa Schappell. None of the women are setting themselves up to be tragic characters, but they end up that way chasing their own notions of post-feminism. In a way, "Porno Girl" is a brilliant study and a compelling read. The shorts are easily read on a short train ride, and the thematic thread through them all is apparent.

Rating:
Summary: Amusing, Surprising and Emotionally True
Review: Merin Wexler has written a short story collection which you can get happily lost in. Each story drew me in. Each story amused and surprised me, made me hold it tight, not wanting it to end. Each story has lingered in my mind. These stories have some delightful quirks and odd bits, but nothing in them feels false or forced; all of them feel emotionally true. An outstanding short story collection.

Rating:
Summary: Amusing, Surprising and Emotionally True
Review: Merin Wexler has written a short story collection which you can get happily lost in. Each story drew me in. Each story amused and surprised me, made me hold it tight, not wanting it to end. Each story has lingered in my mind. These stories have some delightful quirks and odd bits, but nothing in them feels false or forced; all of them feel emotionally true. An outstanding short story collection.

Rating:
Summary: A Solid Collection and an Interesting Debut
Review: The eleven short stories that make up Merin Wexler's collection, THE PORNO GIRL: And Other Stories, are not as sexually explicit as the title suggests. However, they are about sex and relationships. The collection is divided into three sections dealing with "Mothers," "Daughters" and "Wives", though they are not actually so clearly delineated in content. Each story is about a woman and a relationship: to her husband, to her mother, to her child, to another woman, to herself. Yes, there are relationships with men here, but they are not usually at the heart of what is happening.

In the eponymous story, a young first-time mother is tormented by guilt as she indulges in her uncontrollable compulsion to watch pornographic movies in a neighborhood adult video shop --- all the while holding her infant daughter. Her desire is not to see the pornography per se but to acknowledge the sexual being she was before she gave birth. Her shame does nothing to keep her out of the shop. Try as she might she cannot help but get to know the shop manager, a man, it turns out, with which she has something quite important in common.

Other characters face similar challenges: balancing morality against emotional freedom and proscribed roles against autonomy. Often frustrated and lonely they enter into unhealthy relationships or find themselves (either expectedly or unexpectedly) alone. One woman becomes pregnant in order to keep the nanny who is raising her first child. Two young girls struggle to understand their father's mental illness and turn to each other for support. A young married artist has an affair with a man old enough to be her grandfather and then must lose him, forcing her to question her sexual instincts and emotional needs.

Each relationship, like each woman, is complex. Yet Wexler's style is straightforward and readable. These are average women facing situations and circumstances that, despite the reader's initial shock, are not uncommon. Divorce, motherhood, physical and emotional loneliness, uncertainty, and sexual identity are all deftly explored. Some stories are stronger than others. And those, in spite of their brevity, are quite strong. Overall, this is a solid collection and an interesting debut. Candid about the personal lives of women, Wexler presents her characters respectfully and with intelligence and wit. Without judgment, she allows her characters to act against some stereotypes while personifying others.

THE PORNO GIRL, while not revolutionary, represents a brave and forthright feminist voice. This collection is not a difficult read but is emotionally challenging at times. It will not change your life, but Wexler's characters will stay with you for a while.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

Rating:
Summary: The Porno Girl
Review: The stories in Merin Wexler's terrific debut collection are closely observed and beautifully written. In her exploration of the complex emotional terrain that mothers, wives and daughters must navigate, Wexler presents situations that are both familiar and strange, easy to identify with yet propelled by her characters' individual -- and idiosyncratic -- psychologies. The coping strategies of these characters range from the admirable to the bizarre, but never does Wexler have her characters do anything that is not utterly believable.

The verisimilitude Wexler achieves in these stories makes you believe, for example, that a woman suffering from postpartum blues would find momentary distraction in the seedy peep show booth of her neighborhood porn shop (the baby is asleep in a snuggly strapped to her chest), and that a recently separated mother who cannot get her son into the bathtub finally immerses him in water fully clothed. One of my favorite stories in the collection, "The Closet," explores how a girl deals with the scene her mentally ill father is making in the street below her window. In another, "The Maignot Line," a married woman avoids committing an act of infidelity with an old boyfriend by a chance encounter with a neighbor, who has recently gotten in touch with her "kindred animal spirit."

All of these stories sparkle with Wexler's wry humor and her pathos -- she is very, very funny, yet almost all of the stories are sad. I found that I read this book in almost one sitting -- I simply could not get enough of these endearing, flawed characters. I was sorry to reach the last story in the book because each story was so quietly inventive, so smart, so touching. I recommend this book without reservation, certain that anyone who reads it will be both moved and charmed by it, as I was.

Rating:
Summary: The Porno Girl
Review: The title of this collection of well-written short stories is slightly misleading, although not completely so. "Porno girl" is a nickname endearingly given to a young mother enduring post-partum depression, who finds that furtive visits to a peep show revive in her some sense of physical soundness. But these stories are far from prurient, as the title might suggest. Indeed, although sex as a dimension of maturity plays a role in several of Wexler's stories, it is simply one frequent and carefully used prop among a collection of others, including as well fear and, above all, insecurity. In fact, what comes across most profoundly about the protagonists in these stories is how unsure they are about how to take the next step in their lives. Some, like the teacher in "Helen of Alexandria," have come to a pathetic dead end. Others, like the young woman in "What Marcia Wanted," have been haphazardly (and incompletely) initiated into the world of adults through a sexual encounter. But all these characters lack certainty about where they're going, or even where they are. In an odd way, Wexler's portrayal of the uncertainties of early adulthood is helpful, because she invites us to live in a world of doubt, and not to reject it out of hand for its lack of resolution. Indeed, there is an element of comedy in each of these stories that quietly comes through.

Rating:
Summary: The Porno Girl
Review: The title of this collection of well-written short stories is slightly misleading, although not completely so. "Porno girl" is a nickname endearingly given to a young mother enduring post-partum depression, who finds that furtive visits to a peep show revive in her some sense of physical soundness. But these stories are far from prurient, as the title might suggest. Indeed, although sex as a dimension of maturity plays a role in several of Wexler's stories, it is simply one frequent and carefully used prop among a collection of others, including as well fear and, above all, insecurity. In fact, what comes across most profoundly about the protagonists in these stories is how unsure they are about how to take the next step in their lives. Some, like the teacher in "Helen of Alexandria," have come to a pathetic dead end. Others, like the young woman in "What Marcia Wanted," have been haphazardly (and incompletely) initiated into the world of adults through a sexual encounter. But all these characters lack certainty about where they're going, or even where they are. In an odd way, Wexler's portrayal of the uncertainties of early adulthood is helpful, because she invites us to live in a world of doubt, and not to reject it out of hand for its lack of resolution. Indeed, there is an element of comedy in each of these stories that quietly comes through.

Rating:
Summary: Trash, or Women's Studies Porn
Review: This collection is a load of gender feminist (read "anti-male"), women's studies dreck. Wexler is only a passable writer, and the stories themselves are offensive, tacky, and bitter. In the first story, from which the collection gets its title, a new mom is obsessed with watching porno loops while she holds her infant daughter. At one point, after she drops the child's pacifier on the booth floor, she puts it in her own mouth to "wash" it and then puts it in the baby's mouth. From this one event, do you think the author actually has children herself? Not that you have to have children to write about them, but she should have run this past at least one parent so they could have pointed out that no one would ever do that. Even further, later the same character has to vomit when she picks up a quarter she dropped in the same booth and discovers it landed in a wad of ejaculate. So a pacifier from that very floor is OK, but a quarter is just gross?

Provided you can persevere through even the first story, you can find all the tropes of male-hating women's studies programs, and I quote: regarding the porno place the main character frequents, "the sick destination of desperate misogynist loners"; her feelings about porn, "By then I could admit a smug satisfaction watching the men portrayed there, as if they proved the violence of their sex"; and of course there's the obligatory date rape reference, "It was like the time I was in college and my Iranian roommate convinced me to go with her on a booze cruise around Boston harbor. I woke up the next morning on a sticky water bed without my tights in the lounge of the freshman dorm." (And Iranians drink alcohol? Thought Islam prohibited that. She must've needed her compulsory minority reference, I guess.) The story ends with the most blatant giveaway of them all; the mom bonds with the male porno store proprietor when she places her baby next to his and then reports: "We stood there crouched before a wall of dildos, two of us, new moms." So, the male character has to be feminized to be accepted. Sheesh. ...

But, hey, if vitriolic, methodic hatred of the male half of the human race is your kinda thing, put this baby in your shopping cart. Andrea Dworkin would love this collection!

Rating:
Summary: Trash, or Women's Studies Porn
Review: This collection is a load of gender feminist (read "anti-male"), women's studies dreck. Wexler is only a passable writer, and the stories themselves are offensive, tacky, and bitter. In the first story, from which the collection gets its title, a new mom is obsessed with watching porno loops while she holds her infant daughter. At one point, after she drops the child's pacifier on the booth floor, she puts it in her own mouth to "wash" it and then puts it in the baby's mouth. From this one event, do you think the author actually has children herself? Not that you have to have children to write about them, but she should have run this past at least one parent so they could have pointed out that no one would ever do that. Even further, later the same character has to vomit when she picks up a quarter she dropped in the same booth and discovers it landed in a wad of ejaculate. So a pacifier from that very floor is OK, but a quarter is just gross?

Provided you can persevere through even the first story, you can find all the tropes of male-hating women's studies programs, and I quote: regarding the porno place the main character frequents, "the sick destination of desperate misogynist loners"; her feelings about porn, "By then I could admit a smug satisfaction watching the men portrayed there, as if they proved the violence of their sex"; and of course there's the obligatory date rape reference, "It was like the time I was in college and my Iranian roommate convinced me to go with her on a booze cruise around Boston harbor. I woke up the next morning on a sticky water bed without my tights in the lounge of the freshman dorm." (And Iranians drink alcohol? Thought Islam prohibited that. She must've needed her compulsory minority reference, I guess.) The story ends with the most blatant giveaway of them all; the mom bonds with the male porno store proprietor when she places her baby next to his and then reports: "We stood there crouched before a wall of dildos, two of us, new moms." So, the male character has to be feminized to be accepted. Sheesh. ...

But, hey, if vitriolic, methodic hatred of the male half of the human race is your kinda thing, put this baby in your shopping cart. Andrea Dworkin would love this collection!