The Girl with the Full Figure Is Your Daughter

Ilana Stanger-Ross, a former senior editor of TheArtBiz.com and fiction
instructor in the English Department at Temple University, is currently
a fiction writer in Toronto.

In the title story of Oscar Martens’s first collection, a woman caring
for her elderly father suddenly remembers being sexually abused by him
as a child. She confronts her father and older brother; when they deny
her accusations, she discovers pictures that implicate them both.

Unfortunately, the story’s conceits—suddenly recovered memories and
discovered evidence—seem more like staging than reality. “I wish I
could go back in time to last month,” the daughter says, “before
that tiny nut of information in my brain cracked open and poisoned
everything.” Yet we don’t know who she was last month or, for that
matter, how the month between her revelation and this reflection passed.
Martens provides the drama without first developing his characters; as a
result, the characters are flat and their traumas unaffecting.

The trouble with the title story plagues the entire collection. Plots
are moved through unbelievable coincidences, while structural
experimentation, a feature of many of the stories, jars us out of scenes
rather than deepening our reading of them. In “Taliban Barbie,” a
man gossiping with a stranger in an out-of-town gym realizes they’ve
both been victimized by the same male lover. In “Leila’s Suburban
Grass,” footnotes offer cute insights into the men Leila dates
(“distinguishing marks,” “predicted preferred position”), but
the gimmick wears thin as the footnotes fail to strengthen our
understanding of Leila.

Martens’s stories seize on high-drama situations—a hustler who
preys on Mennonites, a father who kidnaps his child, a mother who
knowingly has a sexual affair with the son she gave up for adoption. But
Martens’s characters never develop enough to explain or justify this
drama. One wishes he would spend a little more time delving into his
characters’ motivations and a little less pushing them into cars and
across borders, letting actions take the place of emotion.