Mary Otis

Mothers and daughters, perhaps one of the most written about relationships in literature. Is it because the relationships between mothers and daughters can be so fraught, so difficult, so complex? Or is it because it can be so wonderful, so loving, so close? Maybe it's because it can be (and often is) all of those things. And maybe it's because it is so easy to see a daughter becoming her mother, whether intentionally or not. Mary Otis' novel, Burst, is a study in a close and complicated show more mother daughter relationship, a love story and a mirror, a desire to be different, and all that that entails.

Charlotte and Viva are mother and daughter, best friends, and co-conspirators against the world. Charlotte is a single mother who is troubled and peripatetic (Viva's description on her college applications). She lives on a whim, pulling Viva with her on her adventures as she struggles with an alcohol addiction that leaves her unable to provide for Viva without help from random old friends and her strict older sister, but never from Viva's absent father. Money is always an issue and Charlotte bargains for survival with things she shouldn't. Viva grows up delighted to be her mother's co-pilot in life but learning things from Charlotte that she shouldn't, especially the way that alcohol eases many things. When, as a child, Viva discovers a true talent for dance, there's a chance that she can escape her upbringing until an accident makes clear just how fragile her own life is.

Starting in the 1970s and running through the 1990s, Charlotte and Viva's relationship grows and changes after disappointments and with a more grown-up understanding. The reader watches with sadness as Viva comes to recognize her mother's demons, and to acknowledge that she cannot banish them. That she falls prey to the same demons and darkness feels inevitable even as the reader hopes that she can conquer hers. The time periods of the novel are beautifully drawn with the nostalgia of the time wrapped in the melancholy of the story. The plot moves between Viva and Charlotte (including Charlotte's past as an aspiring artist before Viva) allowing each character's feelings and motivations to be fully explored beyond their relationship to each other. This is a novel about disappointment and love and all the layers of a life shared closely. It was hard to read about all of the poor choices both Charlotte and then Viva make, afraid to hope for resilience. And yet the reader cannot help feeling sorry for the things that derail these women, to want a better outcome than we expect, and for there to be understanding, self-love, and forgiveness in the end. show less

Despite the ebullience of its title, the stories of "Yes, Yes, Cherries" eddy around forlorn characters and their thwarted desires. The Angelenos in Mary Otis' debut collection are the grandchildren of Nathanael West's mob, anger and violence dissipated, left empty, bewildered. But where West looked away with dread, Otis casts a direct stare, free of judgment.

Otis' characters inhabit unlovely corners of the city — barbecuing at a dingy condo, dallying in a Van Nuys parking lot, renting an show more apartment underneath a hillside garage and having sex in a basement storage closet. Two teens climb a huge cement tank in the middle of Hollywood, unseen. These are invisible people in pockets of the city that go underchronicled.

The book is framed by four stories that focus on Allison (notable for consistently failing to connect), from her isolated adolescence to her rudderless adulthood. In the first story, set in Massachusetts, her own actions surprise her; self-knowledge extends only as far as knowing she wants to move to California and marry a carpenter. She manages the former, but little more. Her not-carpenter husband says she "has stretches of bafflement." In stories peppered with disaster, Allison loses two jobs, discovers her marriage is in trouble and seeks help from a discount therapist. It cannot end well.

Allison is the book's narrative heart, aimlessness be damned. Her trajectory, such as it is, is propelled by the book's other stories, in which flights of imagination are the closest anyone gets to escape.

A bookstore clerk would rather envision a happy future with a stranger than face her date's disinterest. A woman's affair cools as she develops a strange tenderness toward her lover's wife. A mother sees her daughter sliding into macrobiotic oblivion, and no sacrifice can slow her descent. A teenage girl leaves a cultish Christian sect and, floating from a deadbeat druggie boyfriend to the fringes of the Russian mob, begins to create a new moral code. And a small boy watches his father hustle and fail to flow.

What ties them all together is Otis' strong voice, which is jittery and electric, unsettling like the Santa Ana winds that background the story "Welcome to Yosemite." The omniscient narrator follows closely over the shoulder of each protagonist, bringing the same eye for detail from one story to the next. This narrator, though, rarely jumps inside the characters. Staccato details fall one after another. Emotion is indicated but not revealed. As a result, at an essential level, these stories fail, like Allison, to connect. Ultimately the people on the page are unknowable, existing at a remove, as if seen from a passing car.

Yet Otis' gaze lingers. She dwells in the harsh sun of a Nordstrom parking lot, glimpses an imaginary verdant world through a child's eyes. When Allison, in the final story, stretches into some humor, and even some hope, it's a welcome relief. Perhaps the electric winds can carry her and the rest forward after all.

Review from the Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-kellogg27may27,1,7464406.story) show less

A strong collection of well-observed stories about contemporary American women, of various ages and in various circumstances. Lively writing.