“Shout Her Lovely Name” & “10:04”

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This LitStack Rec says it’s time to read Natalie Serber’s collection of voice-driven stories “Shout Her Lovely Name,” and Ben Lerner’s stunning “10:04”

Shout Her Lovely Name, by Natalie Serber

In the title story of Natalie Serber’s debut story collection, Shout Her Lovely Name, the narrator offers a bit of advice—the kind you need if your daughter has an eating disorder and won’t talk to you:

Later, after you have eaten half the brownies and picked at the crumbling bits stuck to the pan, apologize to your daughter. She will tell you she didn’t mean it when she called you chubby. Hug her and feel as if you’re clutching a bag of hammers to your chest.

Only motherhood can bring up this mix of entanglement, devotion, and torment, and Serber’s stories in Shout Her Lovely Name occupy this fraught territory—the complexities of intimacy and animosity between mothers and daughters. The collection intersperses stand-alone pieces that look at the frictions daughters bring to mothers, while the linked stories center on the relationship of a single mother, Ruby Hargrove, and her daughter, Nora, in which the complications tend to arise from the mother’s side—but no matter which stance Serber writwa from, she delivers authority and insight.

She also writes with great style—her portrayals are smart and perceptive, the pacing brisk, and the narrative voice intimate and pervasively self-aware. Serber’s characters, like those in stories by Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro, regard womanhood with a certain self-deprecating irony:

The therapist, in her Prada boots and black cashmere sweater, speaks in a low voice. She has very short hair and good jewelry. Stylish, you think; your daughter will like her.

Serber’s characters in Shout Her Lovely Name have a tendency to compare themselves with this kind of woman, the kind who if she has self-doubt doesn’t show it, who ably manages the dizzying and often contradictory codes of feminine personae—who wears Prada boots and good jewelry, is powerful or confident or capable without irony.

In Shout Her Lovely Name‘s title story, from which the above excerpts are taken, the second person point-of-view and instruction-manual style echoes Moore’s “Self-Help” (which also inspired Pam Houston’s “How to Talk to a Hunter”), with a plot couched largely in the declarative:

Realize an expert is needed and take your daughter to a dietician. In the elevator on the way up, she stands as far away from you as she possibly can. Her hair, the color of dead grass, hangs over her fierce eyes.

The “you” is of course a proverbial veiled “I,” and Serber makes it her own, adding photographs of size 00 jeans, nutritional labels, and a recipe for birthday brownies.

In Shout Her Lovely Name, the voice-driven story is one of Serber’s strengths and some of the book’s most vivid material can be found in the stories that frame the collection. Both feature daughters coming of age and mothers poised on the brink of a new phase in their lives. For the mothers, it’s a contradictory state, one of maturity and change, experience and uncertainty, and memories of youthful missteps they can’t quite shake.

In the book’s concluding story, “Developmental Blah Blah,” Cassie, the middle-aged wife and mother of teenagers, is throwing a party for her fifty-year-old husband and can’t calm the doubt and bewilderment running in her head. Cassie manages her life with aplomb, but is beset by the thought that little lies ahead. In a session with her therapist, Seth, she asks about “developmental milestones in midlife”:

Pausing just long enough to show mild amusement, Seth told her that the sense of one’s life in a constant upward spiral vanishes. He gestured too, his finger describing a tiny tornado pointing forever higher. “That’s no more,” he’d said with his frustrating unflappable tone. If Seth didn’t (1) hang on her every word, (2) find her funny, and (3) sport a thick brown ponytail, which she fantasized about lopping off and stashing beneath her pillow, she might have slugged him for his cavalier nonchalance.

While there are mothers in Shout Her Lovely Name who willingly face the frustrations and happiness their daughters bring (“All Cassie knew for certain was that Edith was everything”), one imagines Ruby would view the quandaries and trials of motherhood—in the parlance of the time—as pretty much a head trip. “Take advantage of my experience,” she offers, but Nora’s not interested: “She wanted to make her own and unique mistakes. She was nothing like Ruby.”

You can read more from Natalie Serber, author of Shout Her Lovely Name, at The Story Prize blog.

— Lauren Alwan

Other Titles by Natalie Serber

10:04, by Ben Lerner

It’s not often that I recommend a book where very little happens. I admit liking books with at least a little action; I can take philosophizing, musing, and just plain stream of consciousness rambling, but I like to see something that remotely resembles a story arc from beginning to end, with a definite conclusion (or allusion to the next book in the series).

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 doesn’t have a lot of that – arc, storyline, plot. Oh, things do happen:  wisdom tooth extractions, sex, food, artist retreats, gallery openings, even wrangling with artificial insemination (or the rejection of such) and surviving two super-storms that threaten the East Coast. But these are just vehicles for what might or might not be happening, what memory may or may not prove to be true, as expressed through the narrator’s expansive, witty, and oftentimes obscure ruminations – but oh, they are such beautiful ruminations.

The plot, such as it is, is very simple. A young-ish writer living in New York City has gotten a rather hefty advance on a second book, based on a first book that garnered a lot of praise but not a lot of profit, to be based on an idea expressed in a magazine article.

A few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a “strong six-figure” advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in “The New Yorker”; all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel. I managed to draft an earnest if indefinite proposal and soon there was a competitive auction among the major New York houses and we were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene. “How exactly will you expand the story?” she’d asked, far look in her eyes because she was calculating tip.

“I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously,” I should have said, “a minor tremor in my hand; I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.”

And that’s almost exactly what happens. The book that is being considered by the narrative author in the story is the book that we end up holding in our hands.

As the narrator deliberates about what form this sophomore offering will take, life swirls around him. In 10:04, we get to listen in on his mind as it works, which is often very personal, even confessional.

Other people come and go:  his best friend, Alex (or possibly Liza), who has asked him to consider donating his sperm for her planned pregnancy; Roberto, an underprivileged eight-year-old boy that the author acts as an unofficial Big Brother; Teflon lovers, former mentors, others who form into and around the literati of New York, who form a somewhat despotic artists’ residency in Marfa, Texas (a very real place which, according to its Wikipedia page, is “a tourist destination and a major center for Minimalist art”).

This is a book that is written “on the edge of fiction”. It does not read – nor is meant to read – as memoir, and yet the voice of the narrator is so akin to the real life author, what happens to the narrator is so parallel to what has happened to the real life author, that it feels more personal than could be attributed to a truly fabricated character.

The stories told – the demise of the space shuttle Challenger, the attendance at a writer’s soiree, shared conversations while working at the local co-op – thrum with an almost painfully intimate sense of the genuine. It could come off as contrived, as vainglorious or petty, but Mr. Lerner has such a poetic lift to his narrative that it instead comes across as honest and tender.

In fact, I found the writing in this book to be so lovely that I wrote an entire essay sharing passages in this book which had caused me to pause and marvel, from the opening sentence (“The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.”) to numerous points throughout.

When I read a book, if I find a passage that I think may be good to use in a review, I tear a slice off a slip of paper to mark those places for later consideration. This book was literally pin cushioned with many, many slips of paper sticking up willy-nilly throughout its pages.

But in case you may wonder if the book is just too darned esoteric for casual reading (especially if, like me, you enjoy some action in your fiction), know that Mr. Lerner also daubs in a fair amount of humor – often disparaging – and nods to familiar popular culture throughout, that brings the text to a very accessible level.

The very title, 10:04, alludes to the moment in time displayed on the town hall clock tower in the film Back to the Future, when lightning strikes and Marty McFly is thrown back to his own future after having successfully altered his past. Yet, rather than it being a metaphor to what is happening in the book, it manifests itself as a moment utilized in Christian Marclays’ 24-hour film installation, The Clock (a real film artist’s real installation, made up with time references for every minute of the day derived from thousands of movie clips), which the narrator and his friend Alex visit (and which actually was on exhibit in New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery in 2011).

So not only does the story reference a popular film that was crucial to the narrator at a young age, this film also becomes important in the narrator’s present (in that he and Alex made it a touchpoint to watch the movie during times when they are stranded in her apartment due to weather), and it also appears firmly tied to the eternal, in a work of kinetic and lively art.

And actually, that consideration of Back to the Future is a good encapsulation of the entire book. Many levels, many movements through and around time and back and forth through time, many ways of looking at a single moment, many ways of interpreting a single moment, or returning to a single moment with an expanded sensibility, all bound up with utterly gorgeous language expressed in utterly gorgeous ways… there may not be much “action” in 10:04, but there certainly is a heckuva lot going on. 

— Sharon Browning

Other Titles by Ben Lerner

Other LitStack Resources

Be sure and look at our other LitStack Recs for our recommendations on books you should read, as well as these reviews by Lauren Alwan, and these reviews by Sharon Browning.

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