Inside Madeleine

The stories and the novella in "inside Madeline" may or may not change your life, but after reading it, I'm pretty convinced that it's author does two things magnificently well: she presents an intimate, detailed topography of the seedier side of high school social hierarchies and presents an overwhelmingly forceful portrait of female sexual desire. Not every reader will particularly enjoy the content of these stories or the ruthlessly straightforward, unromantic they're set down, but Bomer certainly knows her territory. These stories hit fast and hard, and, to stick with our chosen metaphor, pull absolutely no punches. Her depictions of female friendships, particularly those that subtle class and subcultural lines, are exquisitely show more nuanced, and she seems to have a special talent for describing that moment that youthful exuberance meets cold, hard, wrenchingly painful disappointment. "Reading to the Blind Girl" in particular seems designed to ruin an optimistic college sophomore's day, a deftly unresolvable portrait of young-adult cruelty and loss. Bomer also seems fond of setting her stories in the eighties and early nineties, a period in which populist rock excess gave way to underground scenester cachet and lots of rock kids seemed painfully aware of the amount of cultural capital they possessed. If you had a subscription to SPIN or watched "120 Minutes" every week on MTV, this one might bring back memories.

And then there's the sex. Depictions of sex by female writers often tend to pass over the animal act to focus on the telling detail, the fleeting emotion, or the soft glow of orgasm. Bomer, by contrast, sees sex as relentlessly, bluntly physical, as consuming need and moist mechanical grind. This may disgust or alarm some readers -- and to be fair, a lot of alarming things happen in these stories -- but those who like their sexual encounters, real or fictional, to be quick, dirty, and pointedly unromantic will find a lot to like here. And fans of Mary Gaitskill should stop doing whatever they're doing and buy "Inside Madeline" immediately. But there's also much more here than just prurience and bodily fluids. The novella that gives this collection its name is a surprisingly sensitive portrait of its titular character that uses negative literary space to excellent effect. It's a sympathetic piece that uses excess to trace the shape of its protagonist's empty places. Bomer writes like so much of us is composed of our joyful, desperate, needy bodies, but she doesn't forget that that's not all we are. She also wants to show us that that's not all there is inside of Maddy. show less