The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Women were Leaving the Men, by Andy Mozina
reviewed by Tim Feeney

 

One of the strange things about Andy Mozina’s collection is that two of its first three stories, “Cowboy Pile” (about piles of cowboys) and “The Enormous Hand” (featuring a guy with an enormous hand), are more or less magic realist, Barthelmesque pieces, setting up the reader to expect a certain kind of storytelling. After those, however, the stories settle in to something more regular-realist, which may feel like a letdown—readers, especially RCF types, may be hoping for more along the lines of the early pieces but won’t really get it. (The title story comes close.) In this case anyone whose expectations have been thereby thwarted will miss the fact that all of Mozina’s stories are very good new fiction. Most feature subject matter that by lesser MFA-style hands would be so generic that it might as well be injection pressed: a former astronaut, adrift back on earth, cares for his ailing mother (“Moon Man”); a physically deformed lawyer with a foot fetish pines after a plump, sexually confident plaintiff (“The Arch”); a Harvard Law student and aspiring comedian tries to hold on to his sanity and his on-again, off-again girlfriend (the skin-crawling “Admit”). Most are about aloneness, the inability of a person to truly connect with any other, but Mozina has a lively, engaging voice and a knack for hitting perfect details and quirk-levels, the sort of truths you’ve always felt but never thought (like describing how car commercials feel sad during the fourth quarter of football games). Mozina seems most interested in the bewilderment people feel with where they are and how they’ve gotten there—as he summarizes in “The Love Letter,” “Was there something wrong with him for fucking an old lady in public?” And the answer seems to be Well, no, but you’ll feel pretty strange anyway.