Small Acts of Sex and Electricity
Lise Haines
Unbridled Books, 244 pages, $23.95
It is a sad fact in a woman's life that few of her female friendships go unscorched by the embers of slow-burning envy. No matter how kindred their spirits, female friends risk burnout if a sudden rush of love, success or money upsets the careful equilibrium between them.
Mattie, the protagonist in Lise Haines' compelling “Small Acts of Sex and Electricity,” has long envied the charmed life of her beautiful best friend, Jane. As a child neglected by her own parents, Mattie competed for the attentions of Franny, Jane's glamorous grandmother, and later, secretly, for the heart of Jane's husband, Mike. Although Mattie has never made her jealousies known to Jane, it's clear their unspoken rivalry has eroded the tender moments that once buttressed their friendship.
Still, Mattie, feeling a sense of duty, flies in from Chicago in the wake of Franny's death to help Jane appraise her grandmother's Santa Barbara estate. Soon it is revealed that Jane has likewise envied Mattie's nomadic and carefree existence. When Jane becomes unhinged by the responsibilities of her inheritance and angrily bequeaths her entire life to Mattie, Mattie finds herself drifting into a wary intoxication at the possibility of having the home and husband she always wanted. With Jane gone, Mattie seduces Mike and gains the allegiance of Jane's daughters, allowing Mona to eat sugary cereal and teenage Livvy to smoke pot with her boyfriend.
But as she succumbs to domesticity, sex and idyll, Mattie's conscience hums with a dangerous current. Each vase, each dusty book in Franny's estate recalls a period in her complicated relationship with Jane. Once she can reconcile the pain Jane's self-absorption has caused, Mattie finds she lacks the stomach to live the life passed off to her. “It wasn't that I believed I had a chance at Jane's life, or understood the concept, or even wanted it,” Mattie comes to realize. “But I had leaned in too close, turned the dial past its reception point. I had picked up a signal, the voice had been responsive, animated, hopeful, but it had arrived from the wrong country.”
Haines (“In My Sister's Country”) is a writer-in-residence at Emerson College, a lecturer at Harvard and a talented poet with a studied approach to tone and mood. The closed doors, crackling tension and heady atmospherics imbue “Small Acts of Sex and Electricity” with a welcome subtlety that is often missing in novels about female friendships. And Haines, rather than succumb to the pitfalls of the token happy ending, has followed the wise advice of Chekov: “When you want to touch a reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.”
H20: A Novel
Mark Swartz
Soft Skull Press, 166 pages, $13.95
What is widely available, free of charge and has the power to both destroy and save lives?
The answer is water and the writer in question is Mark Swartz, author of 2002's “Instant Karma.” With all that talk lately about that other, sexier natural resource, “H20” is a refreshing, amusing and somewhat terrifying eco-fable about what might happen in the event the wet stuff starts to dry up. (San Diego's housing prices would drop for good, I'll tell you that.)
It's 2020 and Swartz imagines a world where organizations have replaced God, the gridlock is so bad that traffic is easily outpaced by foot, sports wagers have been replaced by bets on natural disasters and a bottle of water at dinner is a luxury referred to by its vintage. Hayden Shivers, a drain and filter engineer at Drixa Corp., has stumbled upon an invention that can reproduce water – or what seems like water – using the peculiar cellular makeup of a fungus found only off the coast of Malta. His boss and an especially alluring human resources director have put him up in the Brahms hotel and have ordered him to consider signing a letter of agreement that would relinquish all of his rights to his invention to the corporation. The problem is, “H20,” as the fake water is known, hasn't been adequately tested yet, and Shivers worries about its side effects.
Drixa isn't concerned. The head of the corporation plans to blame a fringe environmental group for any problems it might incur, despite the fact that the group is headed by his own daughter. And the media won't get a whiff of the truth. As Swartz writes of this future dystopia, “the media couldn't be trusted to remove the lens cap.”
Although Swartz tends to rush through “H20” (the scientific explanations and character development in the book, which is really a novella, could have done with a bit more elaboration), he has a keen eye for satire, allegory and the intellectual conundrums we find ourselves adapting in the new corporate reality we find ourselves in, “a capital of simulation and simulation of capital, a kind of four-dimensional abacus of bodies and values.”
Tiffany Lee-Youngren is a freelance writer.
