[Schiff's] dark wit gives her stories genuine tensile strength, even when they misfire. She dips into her own braininess as if it were a bottomless trust fund...If these stories are not the real thing, they’re such a good imitation of it that the distinction is meaningless. Ms. Schiff has an almost Nabokovian boldness and crispness of phrase.
[U]nlike other writers of her ilk, Schiff doesn’t tell these tales in a gritty, realistic style, shedding light on something sinister lurking beneath the characters’ sexual whims. Instead, her very short stories are spare and buoyant, bouncing from one insight to the next. Like smart, confident teens trying out new belief systems in earnest, her characters make assured, funny observations about their peers, and then, lightly, move on...These funny, on-the-nose observations might turn off readers who prefer quiet stories. But, the stand-up routine-like quality of Schiff’s characters’ thoughts lends itself to frank discussions of established dating norms.
Schiff’s female protagonists leave their sexual encounters sore, in need of chiropractic care, disconnected from their bodies, with sexually transmitted infections, utterly unsatisfied: 'Guys burrowed down not for long enough, popped up, smiled.' As an argument, this critique of the sexual revolution is thought-provoking. As stories, however, the sameness starts to feel a little numbing, especially because the female characters (who are deliberately indistinct) seem to be mainly reporting on the state of single womanhood when you are sexually free (or is it slutty?)...When the bed is not moving in The Bed Moved, when Schiff turns her attention from fucking to family, even her more conventional stories have movement and moments of genuine feeling.
...rich comedies of manners that take in not just the girls, but also the mystified boys and authority figures in their orbit, the head-shaking teachers and the parents who double as anxious chauffeurs. Schiff’s teenage girls know the boys around them are just as lost. 'We all aspired to orgasm,' one narrator says matter-of-factly, 'but were afraid of our GPAs slipping. Everything counted. We aced Sex Ed.' Throughout the book, her sparse, poetic paragraphs are packed with forceful wit ... [Schiff is a] fresh voice well worth listening to in our mass culture of individuals.
I loved The Bed Moved. I love the traditions of narrative obsession, syntactic contortion, and blurt-it-out black humor from which it springs ... My favorite moments in The Bed Moved pushed past Woody Allen-ish nebbishing and Amy Schumer-ish schlemieling to arrive at a place of bracing savagery ... So much darkness delivered in such consistent doses risks habituation, but Schiff keeps things lively with her fearlessness and/or shamelessness and/or fearlessness of shame. This quality—and the refusal or inability to distinguish its different versions from each other—marks Schiff as heir to a specifically American Jewish tradition.
...a brave, intimate scrapbook of loss ... While occasionally missing the mark, Schiff’s writing, for the most part, is both powerful and poignant. 'I only know about parent death and sluttiness,' says the narrator of the final story — a fittingly understated credo for the collection as a whole. The Bed Moved is more than this, however: it is a daring appraisal of adulthood, sexuality and death amid uncertainty and self-doubt.
Ms. Schiff’s stories are so sharp and concise—the shortest comes in at less than a page—that at times they hew closer to poetry than fiction ... While this approach lends the collection a strong sense of cohesion, it also makes it feel as though The Bed Moved is composed of personal essays reworked into pieces thinly disguised as fiction ... Ms. Schiff’s insistence on exploring a relatively small subset of issues is both the strength and the weakness.
