What do you think?
Rate this book
Your Body is Changing
I picked this up because it has a blurb on the front by George Saunders and I saw the writer has frequently been in McSweeney's (which doesn't necessarily seal a deal on its own). It didn't hurt that he quotes the inscrutable Charles Fort after the dedication page.
250 pages, Hardcover
First published May 31, 2007
6 people are currently reading
168 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
January 6, 2008
This is a very funny, very out-of-the-ordinary collection of short stories (7 stories and the novella-length title story). Most of Pendarvis' characters make Ignatius J. Reilly look like a guy you'd take home to Mama. The stories are wild and whimsical and Pendarvis' imagination rarely slows to less than a gallop (leading to lots of tangential forks in the narratives that somehow end up fitting just fine). If you can conceive of finding rotting teeth funny, this book would be fun for you. Also, the cover is one hell of a conversation-starter on the subway.
My favorites were "Roger Hill" and "Tollbooth Confidential." The title story, about a fundamentalist 14-year-old boy who is developing a breast as he goes on a mission to get to New York in order to fulfill what he believes is Jesus' order to save a girl in a coma by making out with her, is also pretty awesome.
(Full disclosure, I've met Jack Pendarvis a couple times and think he's great.)
My favorites were "Roger Hill" and "Tollbooth Confidential." The title story, about a fundamentalist 14-year-old boy who is developing a breast as he goes on a mission to get to New York in order to fulfill what he believes is Jesus' order to save a girl in a coma by making out with her, is also pretty awesome.
(Full disclosure, I've met Jack Pendarvis a couple times and think he's great.)
July 20, 2007
This is some great modern surrealist dark humor. Took me to new pinkish bramble covered places in my charred cerebellum. Occasionally like David Sedaris but much deeper, darker and literary.
October 24, 2021
It's fitting that George Saunders blurbed this book. These read like his kind of stories, about the grotesque and flawed and wonderfully oblivious normal American. And even though Pendarvis couldn't match Saunders' expansion to novels, his short stories are awesome. Twisted, heartbreaking fun.
June 18, 2018
The title story was definitely my favorite (kind of a George Saunders vibe there), but overall this collection was pretty "meh" for me.
June 26, 2007
At first glance, Your Body Is Changing, the new short-story collection by Jack Pendarvis, is right out of the George Saunders school of satirical short fiction. The eight stories compose an allegorical road novella, stories of unlovable schmucks stuck in their ruts, and a few pieces of experimental fiction. But Your Body Is Changing is not only an outrageously odd book, it’s a knee-slappingly funny read.
The collection’s title story is a road novella that features a fatherless young Alabama boy of 14 named Henry Gill, whose catalog of miseries includes an overarching belief in God, a teenager’s raging lust, a bad haircut, worse acne, and a lump on his chest that, due to an overabundance of estrogen, behaves suspiciously like a lactating breast. When his mother’s uncle suffers an aneurysm, she accompanies the old man to London for treatment, leaving Henry free to set out on a vision quest catalyzed by the appearance of Jesus, “who looked a lot like Luke, the scruffy diner-owner on the Gilmore Girls.” Jesus/Luke wants Henry to help Polly Finch, the paralyzed Miracle Girl of Upstate New York, get back inside her body, a task that is for Henry the perfect blend of mystical and kinky.
Henry wanders in the wilderness, looking for signs. He goes from a public golf course to the home of a crackpot professor to an outsider artist’s Scarecrow Farm installed at a dilapidated high school. The artist, Brother Lampey, recruits Henry to be his disciple and help him deliver the Ten Commandments scribbled onto a cardboard refrigerator box to New York City in a wagon pulled by “six or seven shabby-looking goats who smelled very bad and had a dull, evil look in their eyes.” Henry makes it as far as Birmingham before he abandons Lampey and is taken in by a trio of performance artists at a lesbian dive bar. Henry experiences his first erotic encounter that involves the curious lump under his shirt. Instead of being flooded with shame, he realizes “there was some holiness to it after all, maybe not much, but some.”
Your Body Is Changing takes its name from a book Henry’s grandmother gives him, the subtitle of which is A Christian Teen’s Guide to Sexuality. Henry’s quest is very much in the vein of Huck Finn, i.e., every road movie from the late ’70s onward. Pendarvis drags the Southern gothic story into the realm of contemporary grotesque. His protagonists are as biblically fixated as those characters out of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner, but they get their kicks off pop culture. Pendarvis’ perfect reader might be a hyperintelligent plus-size goth chick with Suicide Girl ambitions and Bible quotes on her MySpace page.
Pendarvis’ not-so-lovable losers aren’t sons of FIRPO so much as backwoods relations who, thanks to cable television and the Internet, exult in the same flotsam and jetsam of lowbrow culture that the rest of us do. In Saunders’ milieu, this is cause for outrage, but in Pendarvis’ purview, it provides occasions for humor of the most ribald sort, particularly when the prohibitions of Christianity are brought to bear. The tension between these forces makes lines like “Oh, Laura Prepon [of That ’70s Show fame], you have the wide enticing face of a beauteous harlot. You have a vulva like a velvet boat” screamingly funny, not because they are shocking or vulgar, but because of the moral cost to the loser who dreams them up. Therein lies the love. But is it literature with a capital “L”?
Heavens, no, but Your Body Is Changing is bad and dorky to the bone, and likely the funniest book you’ll read all year.
(Exerepted from review published in the L.A. Weekly, June 20, 2007:
[http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/boo...])
The collection’s title story is a road novella that features a fatherless young Alabama boy of 14 named Henry Gill, whose catalog of miseries includes an overarching belief in God, a teenager’s raging lust, a bad haircut, worse acne, and a lump on his chest that, due to an overabundance of estrogen, behaves suspiciously like a lactating breast. When his mother’s uncle suffers an aneurysm, she accompanies the old man to London for treatment, leaving Henry free to set out on a vision quest catalyzed by the appearance of Jesus, “who looked a lot like Luke, the scruffy diner-owner on the Gilmore Girls.” Jesus/Luke wants Henry to help Polly Finch, the paralyzed Miracle Girl of Upstate New York, get back inside her body, a task that is for Henry the perfect blend of mystical and kinky.
Henry wanders in the wilderness, looking for signs. He goes from a public golf course to the home of a crackpot professor to an outsider artist’s Scarecrow Farm installed at a dilapidated high school. The artist, Brother Lampey, recruits Henry to be his disciple and help him deliver the Ten Commandments scribbled onto a cardboard refrigerator box to New York City in a wagon pulled by “six or seven shabby-looking goats who smelled very bad and had a dull, evil look in their eyes.” Henry makes it as far as Birmingham before he abandons Lampey and is taken in by a trio of performance artists at a lesbian dive bar. Henry experiences his first erotic encounter that involves the curious lump under his shirt. Instead of being flooded with shame, he realizes “there was some holiness to it after all, maybe not much, but some.”
Your Body Is Changing takes its name from a book Henry’s grandmother gives him, the subtitle of which is A Christian Teen’s Guide to Sexuality. Henry’s quest is very much in the vein of Huck Finn, i.e., every road movie from the late ’70s onward. Pendarvis drags the Southern gothic story into the realm of contemporary grotesque. His protagonists are as biblically fixated as those characters out of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner, but they get their kicks off pop culture. Pendarvis’ perfect reader might be a hyperintelligent plus-size goth chick with Suicide Girl ambitions and Bible quotes on her MySpace page.
Pendarvis’ not-so-lovable losers aren’t sons of FIRPO so much as backwoods relations who, thanks to cable television and the Internet, exult in the same flotsam and jetsam of lowbrow culture that the rest of us do. In Saunders’ milieu, this is cause for outrage, but in Pendarvis’ purview, it provides occasions for humor of the most ribald sort, particularly when the prohibitions of Christianity are brought to bear. The tension between these forces makes lines like “Oh, Laura Prepon [of That ’70s Show fame], you have the wide enticing face of a beauteous harlot. You have a vulva like a velvet boat” screamingly funny, not because they are shocking or vulgar, but because of the moral cost to the loser who dreams them up. Therein lies the love. But is it literature with a capital “L”?
Heavens, no, but Your Body Is Changing is bad and dorky to the bone, and likely the funniest book you’ll read all year.
(Exerepted from review published in the L.A. Weekly, June 20, 2007:
[http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/boo...])
April 27, 2008
This guy is wacky! And that's a good thing. Pendarvis may be my neighbor. After all, he is from Atlanta. But, like all the cool people, he probably lives in Virginia-Highlands or Decatur or someplace far away from my neighborhood of NW Vanillaville. So who knows?
Anyway, what a riot of a collection of short stories. The eponymous story is all cognitive disonnance. Pubing teen BOY with lactating extra breast, very Chreeeestian, meets today's real world, which includes lesbians and ... um ... some relief.
Loved "Courageous Blast: The Legacy of America's Most Radical Gum." Anyone who has ever worked in marketing or advertising will laugh their butt off at this one.
You will shake your head the whole time you are reading this book, saying to yourself, "He did not just write that!"
Enjoy.
Anyway, what a riot of a collection of short stories. The eponymous story is all cognitive disonnance. Pubing teen BOY with lactating extra breast, very Chreeeestian, meets today's real world, which includes lesbians and ... um ... some relief.
Loved "Courageous Blast: The Legacy of America's Most Radical Gum." Anyone who has ever worked in marketing or advertising will laugh their butt off at this one.
You will shake your head the whole time you are reading this book, saying to yourself, "He did not just write that!"
Enjoy.
January 7, 2009
Loved this. The relative low rating is, I don't know, due to maybe a few too many easy shots taken throughout the book? Easily in the George Saunders vein and pretty sharp on all kinds of levels of human failure -- there will be no shortage of that to poke fun of for aspiring writers as far as anyone can see. But in the end -- is that what we're always looking for? This guy is walking the line and the book is good for laffs and some pride-checking, I just fear the idea of reading it and coming away thinking something like, "Gawd, people are so stupid!" Which, hey it's true, but what's the point? I don't think that's his intention, but the boundaries aren't always that well-maneuvered. Good book, regardless!
December 6, 2007
I picked this up because I liked the cover. I'd never heard of the author. I'm glad I did. This book of stories, his second, is extremely funny, with characters that, whether they know it or not, are completly insane. But there is also a heart and brain behind these stories. I find his writing new and exciting, with characters I still remember. Most would probably call him a post modern social satarist, but I'm not smart enough to come up with something like that, so I'll just say if you're a fan of McSweeney's you'll dig him the most.
September 27, 2011
"This is contemporary literature!" I shouted at Ben, after he quite forcefully laughed at segments of "Outsiders." Yeah, "The Mysterious..." was more LOL-ful for me, but this was... I still can't find the word. Worldy. Like... the worlds were so... realized? It was like I was in them worlds that each of them stories occupied. And I recognized my own world, just on the other side of the page-glass. I dunno... I feel affected. Blessed, even. Special thnax to Peter Berghoef for loaning me this number. Way to do that!
April 2, 2008
I really liked that first story, but when I got to the second, I realized that all his stories were going to be like that: a rambling misfit is thrown into a strange situation in which his Falstaff ignorance proves to be an unwitting asset. So I'll just stop at liking the first story.
It did make me appreciate the Ben Greenman book I read a while back a lot more. If you are hungry for young weird short fiction, I'd pick that over this.
It did make me appreciate the Ben Greenman book I read a while back a lot more. If you are hungry for young weird short fiction, I'd pick that over this.
October 12, 2008
I feel like I should've liked this book more than I did, because I have a feeling it's considered hip and esoteric. Alas, I was underwhelmed by how similar each character was written from story to story, and when a story ends by a person being bitten in the throat by a rattlesnake for no apparent reason and in a later story a woman sucks the milk out of a lactating 15-year old boy..well, I think maybe I just didn't get it.
April 2, 2011
This is my kind of humor. I absolutely love when a story would start on something completely unrelated to what was just happening. If I were to tell a story, this is how I would do it. You don't see many stories written this way. Everything shouldn't be written like this but it's so great to see something very different from all the popular stuff out there.
June 16, 2011
Pendarvis' observations about truly over-the-top people and his ability to relay their conversations makes him a craftsman. His humor and voice are unique--no need to compare him to his contemporaries. I gave it 3 stars because this collection with a weaker novella didn't have the punch of Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure,a fresh and startling collection.
July 5, 2007
The characters are to die for. The stories are unconfident and lacking in substance. I wish they would live out their potential. Though I am glad I read it for the characters which did make me laugh and realize some ironicies in everyday life.
January 7, 2008
This collection of short stories was described as having "an intelligence and empathy rarely found in modern satire". Not quite. The stories are amusing and the author has a flair for colloquial dialog, but it's not living up to my expectations so far.
December 28, 2007
Not as openly humorous as his first work of fiction, but colorful stuff all the same. Reminds me of the drama of Adam Rapp. I especially liked Tollbooth Confidential, but missed some of his earlier stuff, which was Woody Allen-esque.
February 21, 2008
The first short story in this collection had me laughing so hard I was absolutely excited to read more. But the remaining stories were only OK. I thought the title story wasn't that interesting at all.
May 6, 2008
If you have always been leery of Arkansas, this book will make you even more so. Pendarvis's stories are full of the unexpected and excell at making me cringe. The title story, especially, is wonderful.
August 24, 2016
It wasn't what I expected at all, which is fine, but it also wasn't that great. I stopped in the middle of the titular story because ain't nobody got time for a two-page monologue without paragraph breaks. Sheesh.
November 7, 2012
Was just thinking about the last story I read in this collection and smiling today. It was due back at the library and I didn't renew it due to competing pleasures but I'll go back for more of this giddy candy.
May 19, 2013
I gave this one a few days to settle in...
and all I'm left with is "Blech..."
two and a HALF stars...
(see review at my blog All Book Reviewer)
and all I'm left with is "Blech..."
two and a HALF stars...
(see review at my blog All Book Reviewer)
June 3, 2007
Fun, lots of dialogue, quirky clever without being snarky. I especially like the last piece in the book, called "Final Remarks."
Read
September 2, 2007Great great great book of short stories from one of the funniest, best writers out there.
November 9, 2007
mediocre title story keeps this from 5 stars. "tollbooth confidential" is my second favorite pendarvis story, after the excerpt i've read from "awesome", his upcoming novel. this guy is my favorite.
April 9, 2008
Gross!
July 23, 2008
Loved it. Hilarious. Great to read right after, say, graduating with an English lit degree.
November 7, 2009
This is an awesome book. Jack Pendarvis is really my boyfriend.
September 22, 2010
LOVE Jack Pendarvis - think I'm a better fan of his OA work than this collection though
June 14, 2012
This book is so good. I've reread, and reread it over and over. It's hilarious.
My review is likey not helpful at all, but if I'm willing to reread something, it has to be worth a glance.
My review is likey not helpful at all, but if I'm willing to reread something, it has to be worth a glance.
April 12, 2013
Couldn't finish the last story. I didn't like the book. You might. I didn't.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews