Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Maze
by Jennifer Juneau
Roadside Press
Sept 2024, $15, 162 pages, ISBN: 9798335932752
The dozen stories in Jennifer Juneau’s new collection live up to the book’s title. She often has you feel as if you are working your way through her narratives, looking for the way forward, or at least trying to get ready for what comes next; the reader is prepared to be gobsmacked by what lies around the corner of the labyrinth. (“What’s ‘gobsmacked’ mean?” Margot said to Patsy. “No idea,” Patsy said. “Probably something horrid.” “It means ‘shocked,’” I said, “in Brit,” as Juneau writes in “Fast Food Horrors.”) The title MAZE seems to come from the story, “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” in which the narrator, Isabel, notes about her boyfriend’s precocious daughter, “I was lost in the maze of Charlotte.”
Indeed, the characters are all puzzles. Isabel herself, who narrates the first story, “If a Tree Falls,” and the subsequent story, both of which include her mother Sylvia and her boyfriend Jean Pierre and his daughter, is perhaps the biggest mystery of them all. The two stories take place in France. In another story, “Isabel B.,” the mysterious college student (the story is narrated by her professor, who is obsessed with her) may or may not be the same character. Juneau is deliberately coy, and the reader wanders the maze in search of clues.
The Isabel stories all involve suicide. We gradually learn about the tragic circumstances of her brother Trey’s suicide, in that powerful first story, in which Isabel, in denial about his death, which she did not actually witness, having fled to Europe, does not accept (and if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?). This naturally disturbs her mother, and Sylvia comes to France ostensibly to care for her daughter, though for the most part she seems ineffectual, mostly asleep (literally). “Isabel,” Sylvia says in a telephone conversation, alarmed, “I think you ought to come home for a while. I don’t think you’re right.” The reader has a similar impression!
Charlotte, it turns out, is likewise “smitten with suicide and anyone who committed it.” (“Charlotte was the most fucked-up four-year-old I ever met,” Isabel tells us.) When Charlotte tries to get Sylvia to play “Hangman” with her on the car trip from Paris to the Cote d’Azur, Sylvia reacts with horror, as her son Trey had committed suicide by hanging himself. Later, at the vacation home, Charlotte gets Isabel to construct a noose for her so her doll Cindy can hang herself. There’s likewise a rumor among Isabel B.’s classmates that she tried to commit suicide as well.
Similarly, the drug-addicted narrator of “The Day Before I Died,” who lives in Switzerland, concocts various schemes to feed her habit. It’s a suicidal spiral that at least once lands her in the hospital. As she sits on the bus headed home from the pharmacy, where her scheme to secure drugs may or may not have succeeded, she falls asleep and dreams of rescuing a dead baby. But the baby and the dream “suddenly collapsed into the absence which I woke to.”
Again, we are wandering Juneau’s maze of character and fate, a quest fueled by obsession and sorrow.
Jennifer Juneau’s comic gifts are evident in so many of her stories, from “Fast Food Horrors,” “Eight Days with the Yakatori Sisters,” and “Nipple Knows Best” to “Broken,” “Blind Date” and “Smoking.”
“Fast Food Horrors” features Chef Gordon R. Crank, the Gordon Ramsay character from her 2020 novel, ÜBERCHEF USA, a satire about “Reality TV” and specifically the program Master Chef. “Fast Food Horrors” spoofs another of Ramsay’s television shows, Kitchen Nightmares, in which he makes over failing restaurants in order to revive their business. (Margot, Patsy and Corey, the narrator, are college friends, run a restaurant in East LA called Burger Without a Bun). Again, we’re in a sort of David Lynch maze of character and plot. God is a character in this story.
The story “Smoking” begins with the intriguing line, “The thrilling part about starting to smoke is that everyone around me is trying to quit.” The narrator is a fourteen-year-old girl until – poof! – she is suddenly the mother of her own daughter, who treats her the way a parent treats a recalcitrant teenager:
Stephanie, my teenaged daughter, is waiting, arms folded, for me at the garage door when I get home.
“Where were you?” she says, tapping her foot. “You’re late.”
“I was at the mall,” I say, holding up a shopping bag.
“What’s that smell?” she says.
“What smell?” I say. “I don’t smell a smell.”
“I don’t know,” she says, “it smells like—the public. Were you—smoking?”
“The public?” I say. “Smoking?” I say.
“Hypocrite,” she says.
Everything is topsy-turvy in the maze, like a kaleidoscopic funhouse mirror. In “Eight Days with the Yakatori Sisters,” Dora, the narrator, a graduate student in Boston, feels responsible for the collapse in the fruit and vegetable aisle in a supermarket of Mister Yakatori. (“I hated supermarkets and everything associated with them,” Dora tells us.) Dora gets sucked into the dysfunctional Yakatori family dynamic, driving the daughters around Boston as a sort of self-assumed penance, only to be rewarded with scorn, ridicule, and a lawsuit. In “Broken,” the protagonist literally loses her head, not once but three times.
Jennifer Juneau deftly plays the reader with astounding grief one minute and manic hilarity the next, sometimes both at once. It’s a cinematic maze of emotions, as in a film noir where you wonder if that lady at the playground is the kindly caregiver she appears to be or a monstrous child molester.
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.