The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Celibacy Club by Janice EidisTrey Strecker
Janice Eidus. The Celibacy Club. City Lights, 1997. 200 pp. Paper: $9.95.
Janice Eidus’s second collection of nineteen comic short stories traffics in the myths and fairy tales, fantasies, and pop icons that constitute our “collective unconscious.” Her characters—often disaffected, confused, bored, witty city dwellers—rely on mythic dreams to organize their lives and lend importance to their existence. In the opening story, “Elvis, Axl,and Me,” a woman discovers Elvis hiding out as a Hasidic Jew in a Bronx deli, and they begin an affair—although she actually lusts after Axl Rose—imagining that he will be her true love after the tribulations of rock and roll stardom eventually force him to fake his own death. A screenwriter in “Making Love, Making Movies” envisions his adulteries as scenes from B-movie scripts, casting real people in character roles. Over several stories, Eidus’s interest in the American psyche extends beyond media culture to examine our current fascination with self-improvement programs. While the title story’s narrator investigates an unusual support group that encourages her to sublimate her sexual desire with rich desserts, other stories concern Barbie’s publicity-seeking attempt at female bonding (“Barbie Goes to Group Therapy”) and a woman who abandons herself to an obsessive romantic infatuation with exercise equipment (“Nautilus”). In spite of these wonderfully peculiar stories, whose quirky attitudes invite comparisons with T. C. Boyle’s short fiction, this is an uneven collection. Sketches about a torrid liaison with actor-turned-aspiring-playwright James Dean(“Jimmy Dean: My Kind of Guy”) and a support group of women mourning their hairdressers’ AIDS deaths (“Ladies with Long Hair”) create provocative situations which the author fails to develop. Overall, however, Eidus’s stories are bizarre, hip explorations of the allure of modern myth, written in a fresh, lean, fast-paced, urban prose. [Trey Strecker]