Lange is a chronicler of all that is strange and secret about people, mining that strangeness for comedy and pathos ... Has a fondness for autodidacts and obsessives and is adept at blending esoteric references (ranging, in this story, from the Bible to contemporary art to ancient myth to Lydia Millet to the work of the Center for Land Use Interpretation) seamlessly into her own idiosyncratic worldview ... Lange often writes in this mode, a kind of funhouse mirror of ecofeminist criticism; her women tend to be deadpan wits in a dying world ... This reads as commentary on capitalism and control, but also, perhaps, as a description of storytelling.
Lange gives the banality of day-to-day life a second, louder heartbeat ... Collectively, these stories balance on the line that separates the mundane from the profound when it comes to a monotonous American existence ... Lange does a remarkable job capturing the interim background noise of a floating memory, a passing daydream, a theory, an observation—and then just as quickly as that thought came, moving onto something else, as normal people do ... Lange is a realistic writer, a feel and don’t tell writer. She asks readers to be objective, leave room for many things to be true at once, and sometimes, question whether a line was intended to be poetry, or bullshit—such is life.
A droll collection of stories about women, sexism, and the weirdness of daily life ... The effectiveness of Lange’s social commentary, however, varies throughout the book’s 18 stories. The tales that succeed are excellent, biting satires from a unique feminist lens; but there are some that don’t quite measure up to the others.
