Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Jenny, 52
by Susan Montag
Red Bird
April 2025, $14.00, 32 pages
“I guess I will say that if you want to get married, good luck but no thank you. I’ve already done that. Twice. But hey. Let’s meet for a drink.” So begins Susan Montag’s ingenious story, Jenny, 52, about a middle-aged woman who has been around the block more than once and knows what she wants – intimacy, yes, but also her independence. The larger question ultimately becomes, is either possible in a pandemic? As the narrator Jenny, who is writing a novel about a character named Jenny, writes, “speculation is the central theme of the entire pandemic, not just the toilet paper thing. There is no solid ground anywhere, only uncertainty.” The deliberate uncertainty about which fifty-two-year-old Jenny Jenny, 52 is about, author or character, provides a charming, delicious confusion to the story that emphasizes the larger point.
Jenny, 52 is a kind of meta fiction about the nature of storytelling, fiction versus reality, in a manner reminiscent of Philip Roth (My Life as a Man, in particular, and all of the Nathan Zuckerman novels generally). Jenny, 52 is made up of seventeen one- to three-page “chapters,” most of which are narrated in the voice of the writer Jenny. Sometimes the audience is the generalized “you” (i.e., “the reader”) and others it’s a specific You, one of the men with whom the Jennys are having an affair.
But several of the chapters (7, 12 and 14, for instance) are related in the third-person. Whereas Chapter 10, say, begins “Some days later you and I are probably in bed again,” writer Jenny talking to a lover, Chapter 12 starts out, “A week later, Jenny tells her French man he can come over.” It’s a subtle shift of perspective, but it makes the French lover seem somehow less “real,” more “fictional.” (“I think about the woman and the French man in my novel,” writer Jenny says in Chapter 5. “The woman’s name is Jenny, like me.”)
For the record, there are three different lovers, the unnamed Frenchman, who is in the United States for business and who has a wife and a mistress back home in Europe; there is also a hirsute conspiracy theorist named Tom with whom Jenny the writer has casual sex on a semi-regular basis. Finally, there is “You,” to whom writer Jenny directly speaks in some of the chapters. Jenny spares “You” from the fond ridicule with which she speaks of Tom and his obsession with the Illuminati and his paranoid beliefs that the government is tracking his movements for some unspecified reason. “You,” in fact is “handsome as hell.” Jenny really seems to dig this one.
Montag/writer Jenny starts Chapter 6 with the observation, “Stories need problems. It can’t be all fireworks and baseball games and great sex.” This is in reference to “You,” with whom writer Jenny goes to a baseball game and invites home afterwards. “We start making out in the elevator when we get to my building.”
So what is the problem? The conflict surfaces in Chapter 13 when Jenny and “You” go out on a date to a French restaurant. They’re having a wonderful time, fine food, good conversation. She tells him about her novel with “Jenny” and the Frenchman. He jokes about the French man in the French restaurant and the pandemic lockdown when businesses were shuttered. “Tonight, though, in this world with no pandemic, the air is filled with the clink of glasses, the hum of voices, laughter.”
They share stories about their past dating lives. She tells You about Tom the hairy conspiracy buff but leaves out the Illuminati, for now, only about the hair erupting from Tom’s V-neck sweater. She also leaves out the fact that he is still in the picture.
“Whoever that man was, he was lucky,” you say.
“I was the lucky one,” I reply.
“How long did it last with him,” you ask.
I’m caught off guard. I just sit there and look at you. And I see something change in your face. And when your face changes, everything in the room changes. It feels hot suddenly. Somewhere a plate crashes to the floor.
How the conflict is resolved – or maybe it isn’t – is one of the pleasures of Jenny, 52. Montag ends the story with Jenny the author speculating about her novel about Jenny, her semi-autobiographical character. “The pandemic itself goes on and on,” she writes, “twisting and turning, reinventing itself and reinventing the people, changing who they are.” It all feels so daunting, so overwhelming, a bit outside of her inspiration. She’s not sure she can write this, or wants to. “But the end of a relationship—I can do that. I can write about the last time Jenny sees the French man….”
Let’s just say it’s not a conventional ending, because I don’t want to spoil it for “You,” the reader. Read Susan Montag’s Jenny, 52, and find out for yourself.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.