Jessica Keener’s collection of short stories somewhat appropriately titled Women in Bed could be for you. But that’s just it: it only could be.
Keener has a voice that is unique and has a talent for descriptions, but the title of this collection is just a tad misleading. Just a few mere sentences of this collection are about women in bed.
Excuse me for sounding lusty and immature, but sometimes a girl just wants to cuddle up with a classic old dirty novel. Had the title of Keener’s work been different, altering my expectations, I most likely would have enjoyed her stories more.
The first short story in her collection is pretty captivating, but a few pages in it is clear that the young woman Keener describes is not getting into bed with the strange woman she encounters at work. I flipped the pages of the small work enjoying the diction Keener chose and her remarkable ability to drop you right into the story just to be let down when hardly anyone was getting into bed with anyone else.
Intimacy may not be everything in life but it’s at least quite a nice slice of it. Had I known I was jumping into tales of young women just trying to get through life I would have had different expectations that would have been met through Keener’s storytelling. Even the reviews on the back of the novel were misleading.
As you continue to read through the tales, clichés seem to sprout up through Women in Bed, and that’s really when I stopped enjoying the whimsical read. First you have an angsty girl smoking cigarettes after sex (one of the few times anything does happen in bed) then there’s a social worker unhappy with her life, and a woman who almost has an affair on the beach. Most of this takes place in Boston, but all the references to the Hub seem forced and unnatural despite going into the read knowing Keener was a local.
I don’t want to knock the whole collection; Keener really did get some great stuff in there. Aside from the flowing, lively descriptions, there are a few stories worth reading. The best part of the collection is arguably the saddest, and I don’t want to spoil that story for you.
Another strength of Women in Bed is the fact that the women in the nine stories are different ages, at different places in their life (physically and emotionally), but could easily all be the same person. It is intriguing to read and wonder if each story is another point in this woman’s life.
Given a different title, minus some clichés, and with some work on the Bean Town shout outs, Women in Bed could have really grabbed attention. It really could have cemented Keener as a new voice in literature. It could have.
