The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Weird Women, Wired Women by Kit ReedIrving Malin
Kit Reed. Weird Women,Wired Women. Wesleyan/Univ. Press of New England, 1998. 214 pp. Paper: $16.95.
Although I am tempted to place Reed as a writer of “science fiction,” I refuse, finally, to categorize her stories. They are, as she mentions in her preface, “speculative.” She writes: “Push reality a little bit in fiction and you underscore what the society is telling you about itself. Push it a little harder to make your point and you find most editors are afraid of any thing that diverges from what they take to be real life.” Reed surely pushes us, creating stories which question the nature of nature, the reality of reality.
Although Reed usually begins with humor, she gradually moves to horror. And she does so in a subtle way. “In Behalf of the Product”—another playful, troublesome title—she gives us a narrator who is “Miss Wonderful Land of Ours.” The narrator speaks in a rehearsed, almost prerecorded way about beauty, patriotism, self-worth. But as she speaks, the words seem to take over. Look, for example, at the last lines: “I am a weeny bit too frank to be a typical Miss Wonderful Land of Ours, he says I have too many regrets, but adjust as soon as I get down from here and they run the last commercial, they’re going to take care of that.” We perceive that she is controlled by the producers and the audience and that she is the product. She has a “cute” voice—I like the word “weeny”—but that voice is so mixed, dreamy, odd that she lacks any sense of self. Most writers would stop here, but Reed pushes once more. The very last line is chilling: “He says I’ll be ready to begin my nationwide personal appearance in behalf of the product just as soon as they finish the lobotomy.” Does Miss Wonderful really need one? Does she have a brain?
In a story of plastic surgery—Reed surely plays with “mutilation”—she writes a sentence which perhaps represents her victorious “pushing” of language: “Amazements take place in the Hall of New Faces, but like life itself, the miracles are only temporary; some things refuse to stay done.” Temporary miracles: in the end Reed is a believer in the ambiguities of salvation and thus she writes religious stories for our weird world. [Irving Malin]