All the Anxious Girls on Earth

Britta Santowski is a freelance writer in Victoria, British Columbia.

Zsuzsi Gartner’s debut collection of nine short stories is an
angst-ridden yet refreshing look at our contemporary media-ordained
life. Her characters, a colorful cast of victim-oriented social
outsiders, leap from the page into centre stage as they enter the
survival stage of media-induced trauma. Each character exists isolated
in her capsule of space, living with millions yet coping alone.

Gartner’s extraordinary handle on extended metaphors adds a
delightful subscript to her plots. Consider Jack in “Pest Control for
Dummies(TM).” Jack is just a dull, ordinary guy. Repeating the words
of his girlfriend—in fact, appropriating her words—he bravely tastes
her words. How brave? Like “an anthropologist in the field who’s
determined to adhere to some throwback tribes’ incomprehensible rites.
... [Like the anthropologist who] holds a small metal shovel with
serrated edges and cracks down hard on the monkey’s skull as the elder
tribesmen clap him on the back. His interpreter tells him he’s the
first white man to be so daring. The monkey’s grey matter squishes
into the spaces between his teeth and threatens to rush back out his
nose.” Yessiree, that’s how brave Jack feels.

Anxieties of achieving the medialike appearance of success permeate
these stories. “Anxious Objects,” cleverly dedicated to “Dr Spock,
R.I.P.,” is a satirical look at a suburban family raising their first
born, literally, by the book. In “Odds that, All Things Considered,
She’d Someday be Happy,” one teenage girl terrorist bombs a
building, a sulky and abhorrent teenage girl dies, and the mother—who
never really liked her (now dead) daughter anyway—starts her own talk
show built on the premise of love and forgiveness.

This invigorating and unique book makes for not only good reading, but
good rereading, where new insights can be uncovered each time.