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A review by korrick
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
2.0
2.5/5
This collection reads like a study in the bleached modern day US experience, and I mean bleached not in the way of the grimly erotic aestheticism of horned skulls lounging amidst the clearest peach-flesh-toned horizon one ever did see, but in the way of the inevitable bird-feced fate of any artificially spawned object that presumes that the fauna did not eat and sleep and breed in its location long before humans placed it and will continue to do so when said featherless bipeds have long vanished from the earth. You see, I was born and have lived all my life in this region that this collection concerns itself with, and I even spent a significant portion of that in that southern "Southwest" portion pursuing higher education. However, I am also queer, and insane in the way that encourages suicidal ideation, and while the manner in which I was raised contributed clearly to that latter attribute, it also inadvertently exposed me to a much more 'diverse' population in a much normal, humanizing fashion than US media likes to portray. So, when a piece of written work either chooses to ignore such themes or, when it must face the non-nuclear or the non-sane or the non-white, can only do so in the manner of either complaint or tragedy porn, it gets a little dull. I'm sure my less than fond memories of my time in these stories' settings also in no small way contributed to my lack of engagement, as the single truly historical piece that broke away from the contemporary sameness of passionless meandering in every field from romance to family matters to personal occupation had to be my favorite. Still, as I've said in my reviews in other pieces of 21st. century lit, if I'm going to bother with this more modern stuff, I expect to see something that tries a little harder to imaginatively escape the boundaries of 1950's WASP suburbia, otherwise what's the point?
I somewhat knew what I was getting into when I saw the extremely high rating for this collection in tandem with a reflection the author wrote on these stories in which she discusses how they were, consciously or otherwise, explicitly written for the white male reader. However, it's one thing to read that and another to experience for oneself the doldrums of white, vaguely female minds looking to swallow themselves up in a housewife existence of extremely capable careermen and mysteriously present money, where the most personably relatable character were the featureless, suicidal, failed mother figures that cropped up in a couple of stories. There's the mythos of the Helter Skelter at the very beginning, but all I know about that is how much the US loves a story of non-cis-het-monogamous sexuality coupled with tendencies towards violation, as well as how one of the victims was married to a sexual assaulter of children whose non-US existence is supported by many well-regarded denizens of the US film industry. I've already mentioned the tragedy porn inextricably tied up with anything queer or non-white, which takes the form of sex work in one story, incestuous rape of a child in another, all with accompanying white men ready and willing to feel the secondhand emotional trauma in a literary critic-approved manner. The one historical piece that I estimated the most avoided much of that, but only because there were a couple of Chinese figures to take on the pathos at the time most convenient for the troubled white boy narrator. So, the book form of films like Gran Torino, or Green Book, which even I'm susceptible to at times. In the end, how long this particular collection admirably survives in the public mind will say a great deal about the development of the contemporary US literature industry in recent times, for better or worse.
So, way too many main narrators unwilling to risk having feelings and way too many 'othered' side characters saddled with the burden of being violated in various ways in order to add a tinge of point and/or poignancy to the particular story at hand. I'm sure this collection also suffered in my estimation due to me, in an extremely rare reading instance, reading another short story collection alongside it that has proved, despite several hiccups, to be much more my style. Or maybe I just can't stand narrators who count the smell of good non-Anglo Saxon cooking among their indicators of a less than quality standard of living, and that being one of the final notes in the final story tarnished my recollections of the work as a whole. Whatever the case, my reservations about reading a work that hit a little too close to a region where I worked mind-breakingly hard at staying in the same place were further compounded by an almost complete lack of something to unreservedly sink my teeth into. Variations on the story of the meandering ephemerality that is mostly middle class white people misery located in various parts of California and Nevada that managed to sink its emotional claws into me every once in a while, but when it comes to such, but I prefer a Cormac McCarthy form of such, not a Joan Didion.
This collection reads like a study in the bleached modern day US experience, and I mean bleached not in the way of the grimly erotic aestheticism of horned skulls lounging amidst the clearest peach-flesh-toned horizon one ever did see, but in the way of the inevitable bird-feced fate of any artificially spawned object that presumes that the fauna did not eat and sleep and breed in its location long before humans placed it and will continue to do so when said featherless bipeds have long vanished from the earth. You see, I was born and have lived all my life in this region that this collection concerns itself with, and I even spent a significant portion of that in that southern "Southwest" portion pursuing higher education. However, I am also queer, and insane in the way that encourages suicidal ideation, and while the manner in which I was raised contributed clearly to that latter attribute, it also inadvertently exposed me to a much more 'diverse' population in a much normal, humanizing fashion than US media likes to portray. So, when a piece of written work either chooses to ignore such themes or, when it must face the non-nuclear or the non-sane or the non-white, can only do so in the manner of either complaint or tragedy porn, it gets a little dull. I'm sure my less than fond memories of my time in these stories' settings also in no small way contributed to my lack of engagement, as the single truly historical piece that broke away from the contemporary sameness of passionless meandering in every field from romance to family matters to personal occupation had to be my favorite. Still, as I've said in my reviews in other pieces of 21st. century lit, if I'm going to bother with this more modern stuff, I expect to see something that tries a little harder to imaginatively escape the boundaries of 1950's WASP suburbia, otherwise what's the point?
I somewhat knew what I was getting into when I saw the extremely high rating for this collection in tandem with a reflection the author wrote on these stories in which she discusses how they were, consciously or otherwise, explicitly written for the white male reader. However, it's one thing to read that and another to experience for oneself the doldrums of white, vaguely female minds looking to swallow themselves up in a housewife existence of extremely capable careermen and mysteriously present money, where the most personably relatable character were the featureless, suicidal, failed mother figures that cropped up in a couple of stories. There's the mythos of the Helter Skelter at the very beginning, but all I know about that is how much the US loves a story of non-cis-het-monogamous sexuality coupled with tendencies towards violation, as well as how one of the victims was married to a sexual assaulter of children whose non-US existence is supported by many well-regarded denizens of the US film industry. I've already mentioned the tragedy porn inextricably tied up with anything queer or non-white, which takes the form of sex work in one story, incestuous rape of a child in another, all with accompanying white men ready and willing to feel the secondhand emotional trauma in a literary critic-approved manner. The one historical piece that I estimated the most avoided much of that, but only because there were a couple of Chinese figures to take on the pathos at the time most convenient for the troubled white boy narrator. So, the book form of films like Gran Torino, or Green Book, which even I'm susceptible to at times. In the end, how long this particular collection admirably survives in the public mind will say a great deal about the development of the contemporary US literature industry in recent times, for better or worse.
So, way too many main narrators unwilling to risk having feelings and way too many 'othered' side characters saddled with the burden of being violated in various ways in order to add a tinge of point and/or poignancy to the particular story at hand. I'm sure this collection also suffered in my estimation due to me, in an extremely rare reading instance, reading another short story collection alongside it that has proved, despite several hiccups, to be much more my style. Or maybe I just can't stand narrators who count the smell of good non-Anglo Saxon cooking among their indicators of a less than quality standard of living, and that being one of the final notes in the final story tarnished my recollections of the work as a whole. Whatever the case, my reservations about reading a work that hit a little too close to a region where I worked mind-breakingly hard at staying in the same place were further compounded by an almost complete lack of something to unreservedly sink my teeth into. Variations on the story of the meandering ephemerality that is mostly middle class white people misery located in various parts of California and Nevada that managed to sink its emotional claws into me every once in a while, but when it comes to such, but I prefer a Cormac McCarthy form of such, not a Joan Didion.