Spectacle: Stories

by Susan Steinberg

In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it an accident. Spectacle bears witness to alarming and strange incidents: carnival rides and plane crashes, affairs spied through keyholes and amateur porn, vandalism and petty theft. These wounded women stand at the edge of disaster and risk it all to speak their sharpest secrets.

In lean, acrobatic prose, Susan Steinberg subverts assumptions about narrative and challenges conventional gender roles. She delivers insight with a fierce lyric intensity in sentences shorn of excessive sentiment or unnecessary ornament. By fusing style and story, Steinberg amplifies the connections between themes and characters so that each devastating revelation echoes throughout the collection. A vital and turbulent book from a distinctive voice, Spectacle will break your heart, and then, before the last page is turned, will bind it up anew.

"Experimental but never opaque, Steinberg's stories seethe with real and imagined menace." —Publishers Weekly

* A San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year *

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Womens, Contemporary, Short Story Collection, Poetry

116 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 8, 2013

About the author

Susan Steinberg is an American writer. She is the author of the short story collections Hydroplane, The End of Free Love, and Spectacle. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, and she was the recipient of a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She has a BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

My problem with Spectacle is that on the surface it appears to be a new form of literature that will challenge all of your notions about what the short story can do. But throughout her collection, Steinberg resorts to the same techniques repeatedly. I might not mind this if those techniques had some sort of zing or clear purpose, but for this reader those techniques felt merely whimsical, typed rather than written. I want my reading experiences to be truly singular, only available with that particular very author. But when I read Steinberg, I get the idea that anyone could have written this.
One of Steinberg’s most prominent techniques is having her narrator say something, then rephrasing or altering it in the following clause:

In the story “Superstar”: We were waiting for the guy whose stereo I stole to walk out.
We were waiting for the guy whose stereo I stole to get into his car and see that his stereo was gone.

In the story “Underfed”: I felt alright, I felt pretty good, I felt pretty great

In the story “Cowboys”: I had a decision to make. I had a serious decision to make

In the story “Supernova”: I was all messed up. I was all kinds of messed up

In the story “Signifier”: As the world went on around him.

And the world went on without him.

And every story has a bad father or a diabolical brother or infidelity or a plane crash.

I wouldn’t really mind Steinberg’s incessant permutations if they stung me in any sort of way. But they don’t. I can’t look into any of these techniques and understand how they really add to the story—looking back on the reading experience, I can’t remember a time where I laughed, or was struck by a vivid detail, or was moved. The first story, “Superstar,” compels you with its ambition, but that ambition feels like a cheat when every following story reads exactly like “Superstar,” told by the same lost young female narrator just with different paragraph breaks or semicolons. As a whole, the book is thoroughly unsurprising.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw Susan Steinberg read from her new novel, Machine, last week at Powell's and really loved her writing and attitude. Decided to start with her stories since she's known primarily as a short fiction star. And Spectacle lives up to the "writer's writer" hype. Such a thrust of language, unusual structure, and burnt-black desire that seems a bit on edge. Maybe it's the sense that she doesn't give a f+%# about her narrators being moral or "likable" that I admire. This book throttles and I am going to read all her other books asap. Along with other recent discoveries Caren Beilin and Kim King Parsons, Steinberg has joined my favorite authors club.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine being trapped in Sartre's vision of Hell with a humor-leeched Lena Dunham and someone who imagines that Lockerbie was all about *her*—despite the fact that her connection to the event was peripheral at best. Now think what it would be like if the latter were a tiresome drunk who forced you to listen to the same grating Goldberg Variations (my dad sucks, my brother sucks, this is not a metaphor, sometimes it is a metaphor, I'm a bad girl, I'm a good girl, I'm a girl who pretends that I am a guy because … shit, I don't know. Terrorism? Anomie? Ennui? A sort of mucky self-involvement that presupposes that other three-dimensional female characters simply cannot exist within the framework of this narrative? Seriously: Spectacle makes Neil LaBute's bilious screeds read like Simone de Beauvoir.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ow.

This book hurts. In fact, I started reading it months ago and had to put It down. But when I picked it up again I was so entranced by what Steinberg pulls off' and by her incantatory prose, that I couldn't put it down again until I'd read it through.

The narrator of each of these twelve linked stories is a woman trying to explain her actions, trying to explain her life, trying to understand the connections between her young life and her present. The character is not always in the exact same story, but it's close enough: the desperate search for love is the same, as well as the disappointment in herself and others, and the haunting legacy of her parents' marriage. Steinberg's larger project is to identify how we learn to perform our selves, and in particular, our gender. She dissects the everydayness of sexism and Internalized sexism as well as anyone I've read.

Along the way her attention to language is amazing, not only in the way she connects the tales through specific word choices, but in her understanding of how words make us--e.g., "To no avail, he said, and I wondered at the word *avail*, wondered if the doctor got to be a doctor because of whatever it was he had that made him use that word."

Ultimately one of the saddest (and most revealing) aspect of the tales is the narrator's isolation from other women--in most, her mother has left never to return, abdicating her role in raising the children, and the one female friend, or potential friend, we are told of has died in a plane crash. The narrator keeps reminding the reader not to get distracted by the guys in the stories, because she is trying to tell something about herself, not about them; and isn't that the heart of sexism? Steinberg sums it up as, hurtling through the title story, she observes, "There are too many guys in this story. For a story about a girl, that is. For a story about being a girl, that is."

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy cow! I stayed at Vermont Studio Center with Susan a few years ago and she mentioned to me that we write about some of the same themes, but wow. This book really blew me away. I really enjoyed the use of anaphora, which created a tone as relentless as some of the difficult topics addressed in the stories. I just read a great blog post by Susan where she describes where she developed her aesthetic and her approaches to writing. You can read it here.

I want to share some of my favorite moments from the book:

"Which is to say the woman is then supposed to know the subtle difference between being a woman and performing one."

"Because it wasn’t my father’s fault, the world. He was too small to take the blame. He was only a person, for God’s sake. It was no one person’s fault, the world. Nothing that small was ever to blame for something that big. I said, Then whose fault is it. And he said, Not mine."

"When I watch through a window, I feel watched through the window."

"Then the woods opened up and we were in a place. It was like childhood. Not mine, of course, but the childhood I wished I’d had."

"It was an accident, I said. An accident, he said. Bullshit, he said. There are no accidents, he said. Bullshit, I said. There are only accidents, I said."

[ayesha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacle was a spectacular read.

The stories written were somehow connected in the most bizarre ways known to mankind. Steinberg did an amazing job with the writing style. That was the best thing about this book. The way things were written aroused feelings of intense despondency within me. It was all so incredibly fascinating. The writing was poetic, sad and very, very different compared to what I have come across.

Out of all the anthologies I have been able to get my hands on so far, Spectacle was the very best. I will surely continue to read more of Steinberg's books and I recommend you to, too.

[Elizabeth Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre, in a good way, like in the way that I had no idea what was going on, by which I mean I want to read more by this author. By which I mean it was kind of bad but I loved it (Review written in similar fashion to the book itself)

[Siobhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this collection of stories that was widely reviewed as innovative and noteworthy. I made note going in that the narrative style was unusual and that it might seem disjointed at times. I appreciated Steinberg's somewhat experimental use of voice in the stories, but had I not read elsewhere that the stories were meant to be written from several points of view of different characters I never would have gotten that from the text itself. For the first few stories I found her style exhilarating and novel, but it quickly became irritating and tiresome. It lost its innovation rapidly and became just a novelty somewhere around the fourth story and I think she would have been much better served to have broken up this particular way of storytelling a bit, to not have written the entire collection in quite this voice, the effect peters out much too quickly and turns back on itself with disastrous consequences. The collection itself really ends up repetitive and bordering on dull instead of daring and groundbreaking, the whole thing ends up seeming like a gimmick and the book ends up feeling like someone at a dinner that you start off having a great conversation with until they say something irretrievably stupid and then everything from then on is grating as hell.

[Bob Lopez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good riddance. It's all about style for me and I didn't like the style these stories were written in. It felt like ironing, but not in an editorial sort of way, in a tedious kind of way. "Susan wrote a book. Or rather, she worked on stories that comprised a book. I read the book. When I read the stories that comprised Susan's book, I felt used. Or rather, I felt abused. Abused by Susan. Or rather, I felt like my time was stolen. I hate my father. I'm a whore."

I feel pretty disappointed, I expected more from a bookriot.com recommendation. Ah well.

[Amanda Hooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost put this book down. I almost didn't finish reading it because it was strange. It was strange, and at times difficult to read. I'm so glad I finished it. The words read like poetry; there was a nice rhythm and cadence that, even though it was different than anything I'm used to, was lovely.
This was probably one of the most honest things I've ever read. It was like I was reading thoughts as they came. It was so easy to relate to even though my life is nothing like hers.
A good, interesting read for sure.

[Roy Kesey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazingly good collection. Not a single weak link, and many of the stories are among the best I've read this year. Formal innovation with serious stakes. Nearly univocal: strong, new, textured. And the collection as a whole feels highly designed: meant as a book from the get-go rather than as a gathering of good stories. Marvelous.

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply outstanding. Stylistically rich, evocative intelligent.

[Michelle Zuppa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will be reviewing this wonderful collection for the Mid-American Review.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Steinberg's Spectacle, is a spectacular collection of thematically- and stylistically-linked fictions, where the artifice of each construction is often engagingly commented on, and the semiotics of desire and representation are critically interrogated. Self-deprecations as well as witty and withering assessments of jerks in the vicious circle abound.

[Remoy Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each time I finish a Steinberg I get closer to the conclusion, "Yo, I think she's fuckin' with us." That us I mean is us as we read.

You don't have to look much further for that to bear out than the opening Contents. There an odd pattern of titles begins to form. By themselves they're singular, fine. But in relationship, how they list down the page, you begin to clock this almost-pattern... Superstar, Underfed, Cowboys, Supernova, Signifier ... These one word titles, specific icons that all have this unknowable, but still this detectable relationship to one another.

Later down the list it becomes clear. There's more here. It's leveled through the title Signified. That is a literary call-back to that earlier short: Signifier.

It's blatant now. There's a clear connection between those two titles; those words; their relationship, and the one to us. There's more here than what's on the page.

Some readers may not see this. Why would you? Knowing of Saussure, Derrida, and the linguists before, even trying to make a way through the gauntlet of theory they play in is by no means for everyone. But some should. Especially the kind of the male goodread pedantic ilk who peddle degrading adjective addled screes hoping to signal through their hundred or so word reviews that their genius is also worthy.

That game of ego, you could argue, is part of the play between the words here in Steinberg's stories.

Many of them similar. Throughout all her stories. Manic, broken women, disgusting men, drugs, drinks, bars, sights of planes, birds, stars that fall from the heavens, so many icons we've come to know that form these close, downcast connections, that when we read through them, in whatever broken sentence structure Steinberg puts us through, it keeps us at a distance, haunted while the themes, the types of characters, have this eery harken that draws us close to similar broken vessels, protagonists if you will, you'll find in say Carver or Denis Johnson, but very dissimilar in the fact that instead, Steinberg centers this sort of manic pixie dream girl as the heroine, and forces our relationship, the reader, to confront not only our frustration with this type of character, her sex, her desire, her vulgarity, but also why we are disgusted with her, why we can't stand the repetitive nature of her, her point of view repeated, why we can't seem to get much closer than her first-person perspective will allow, and paired against those very same archetypal parallels in theme that have again become canon from Carver or Johnson or other male writers who have centered broken men who similarly live these tragic lives full of pathos, yet are still appreciated as tragic heroes, this juxtapositioning of broken experience vs broken experience divided along the lines of gender, then framed all this within stories that literally are nodding through their titles to the linguistic struggle that stories-- not just Steinberg's --but all of them are language pedaled together, in meaning, or even unmeaning, built off the foundation of signs-- whether we can see them or not --in word, in clause, in sentence, in paragraph, on pages, and what they signify and that significance's relationship to us, or maybe, our relationship to them, and that the meaning is only meaning if it is meant again and again and again and again, becoming a pattern of planes, and girls, and supernovas, and cowboys, and women, and asshole fathers, and despair that end up having a sort of significance-- we could call it meaning --specifically through our relationship to them, not granularly like how we relate to each literal alphabetic letter that builds each word, each sign, but to the meaning of it all, the ideas, the themes, the archetypes, the stories, the stories within stories within books within collections within canons, and their relationship to us, to you, to me.

You can read it line by line of what's on the page. And that may charm you. Or it may not. It could possibly piss you the fuck off. I've been close to that. But if you're not left asking why, you're missing out on the real thrill, as Steinberg questions the pattern we've built for ourselves, through story, cause of meaning, making a spectacle of it, of us, together.

[Jenny Shank · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.hcn.org/issues/45.10/dont-...
REVIEW - From the June 10, 2013 High Country News issue

San Francisco-based writer Susan Steinberg experiments with form and structure as she examines the roles men and women play in her arresting story collection, Spectacle. "The woman," she writes, "is supposed to know the subtle difference between being a woman and performing one." An unnamed woman narrates these 13 first-person stories, revisiting certain touchstones -- her relationships with her brother and divorced parents, especially her father, an addict; the memory of a friend's death in an airplane accident; the shifting balance of power between men and women in relationships, especially in tense situations.

In the story "Superstar," for example, the narrator accidentally scrapes a man's car with her own. He screams at her and belittles her, "calling (her) certain names reserved for women," until another man intervenes, taking over the fight, recasting her as "some sweet thing" he must protect.

Steinberg captures charged incidents in sharp and nervy prose, questioning common euphemisms. When the narrator must decide whether to discontinue life support for her father, she writes bluntly: "There are some who say I did not kill my father. Not technically they mean."

The doctor who advises her "did not, of course, use the word kill. He had another word, a series of words, a more technical way of wording." The woman feels pressured by the doctor and by her brother to make this decision over the phone at 4 a.m. In this story and throughout the collection, the narrator stands outside the heat of the moment and speaks from a cool, rational remove. When the doctor sighs, frustrated with her hesitancy, Steinberg writes, "The sigh applies pressure to the woman. Then the woman is supposed to give them what they want."

She takes this emotional distance even further in the story "Universe," in which the narrator's unborn child dies, and Steinberg writes, "One could now drink heavily. One could now eat shark." Sometimes this technique makes the narrator seem callous, but in most of the stories, this flinty stance toward personal loss simply underscores its horror.

Steinberg applies the same intense analysis to lighter moments, as when the narrator agrees to hike with various boyfriends who love nature, as she does not. Steinberg writes, "I'd hiked all day through mud; I was scraped all over, dirty all over; I wasn't averse to dirt; I was averse to something else: like the pressure of having to pretend I cared about a bird, a stone, a star."

Spectacle is a penetrating collection, and although the narrator is sometimes powerless, the author never is. Steinberg masterfully controls language to convey her stark insights about unbalanced relationships, in which one person always has the upper hand over another.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spectacle by Susan Steinberg
(released January 2013 / Graywolf Press)
3 Stars - Stories for all styles
Read 4/8/13 - 4/14/13

You can really never go wrong with a Graywolf Press title. Their short story collections always impress me and this one was incredibly interesting - Steinberg plays around with story structure here AND retells the same story multiple times throughout the collection. A trickster, this one!

Though I totally got into it for the first few stories, I began to tire of the switching styles and different perspectives, and found myself rushing through the current story just to see if the next was any better. What began as promising and intriguing soon became distracting and disjointed for me. I wonder what impact spacing the stories out - pacing myself through the collection over a longer period of time - would have had on me? If you give this a go, that would be my recommendation to you. Space the stories out. Give yourself time to read other things in between. I bet their magic would work better that way.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly heartbreaking tales that seem too too autobiographical (though perhaps it's all made up) in the style of elizabeth crane You Must Be This Happy to Enter trinie dalton Wide Eyed and or lydia davis Varieties of Disturbance and even maybe shelia heti and lorrie moore. so good company no? but still, it almost physically hurt, these stories. author teaches in SF califa i think.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stylistically compelling, but not quite enough for me to sustain a collection. Would prefer to bump into these stories individually in lit mags; I think I needed something more to vary the experience. With the same cheeky voice juxtaposed, in very similar situations, it became a bit monotonous. Reading the first story, I thought, "Brilliant." Midway through I felt a slump.

[Elysebeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt that the themes for all the stories were the same. Depressed person having sex.

[Alastair Hudson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this without knowing anything of Steinberg's writings or aims. Her prose probably gets labelled as "experimental" or "existentialist". Possibly "edgy" and probably "Random". But for me it read more like a stream of conciseness from someone under emotional strain, or maybe some on a bad trip, recalling past memories.
It seemed to scan better when each sentence had it's own line rather than formatted as prose (maybe as I'm more forgiving of bad poetry than bad prose).
That said, I really enjoyed it. Particularly reading it aloud, as in parts the repetition gave it an edgy rhythm and felt almost cinematic.

Each piece is written in the first person and recalls a past traumatic event, mostly sexual. But rather than stepping into the narrators mind I felt more as a witness or friend trying to help someone in emotional distress. But by the end I felt this was a one trick horse; and interesting methodology but difficult to develop to larger scenarios
.

[Nick Milinazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is no intentional metaphor in this story.
There is no intentional meaning in this story.
I would not subject you to intentional meaning.
I would not subject you to some grand scheme."
This collection focuses on different women broken in much the same way. A handful of stories could be the same girl telling their story in a slightly different way, but they are all damaged. As opposed to the last book I read which was brimming with metaphor, Steinberg opts for the opposite approach: paring down the prose to its most vital elements. The sentences and paragraphs are structured in specific ways for emphasis, much like poetry. But unlike poetry these stories are devoid of sentiment. In most cases the women know they are being self-destructive, but do so anyway, and then confront the reader as if to say "and what of it?" If Bukowski were a woman, she would sound an awful lot like this. A strong and unique voice in the literary field.

[Howard Cruz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not particularly fond of this book.
-Somewhat spoilers-
-
-
-
-
The stories, while each different, were from various woman basically in similar circumstances: life has gotten crazy in multiple ways, and generally sex , abuse, and/or substance abuse leads to more of lifes complications, all written in first-person perspective in a type of repetitive poetic style of sorts. It work's in a way as the repetitious ways helps push the emotion of each story on you, but again its like hearing the same lines over and over. It ended up boring me, despite the uniqueness of each story; each woman seemed almost numb to her experiences due to the events of their histories. The stories themselves ended up feeling "Numb".

This book was not a hit with me, but may be with you, review reader. You might find the writing style more appealing.

[Melissanomelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

let's mention the good before the not so good.

What i liked about this book; Steinberg challenges our ideas of femininity versus masculinity as she shows the raw and introspective emotions of our the characters. She also solely focuses on emotion rather than character which is rarely done. I loved the free-flowing writing style but it at times felt all over the place. Spectacle was terse, lyrical and very thought through.

What i disliked about this book ; Steinberg uses violent undertones and psychosexual themes which i found quite uncomfortable and rather unnecessary to the story. It was too much all at once. The interconnected stories all felt very emotionally draining, no reprieve, every emotion you could think of was exercised. You might need therapy after reading this. Jokes aside, the stories lacked nuance.

[Sean Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

After having read Steinberg's "Machine," I knew I wanted to read more of her work. "Spectacle" is a page-turning collection of stories of trauma, disruption, abuse, neglect, survival, neglect, and more. Written with prose that isn't as jarringly experimental as "Machine," the reader is able to fall deeper into each story (though I actually enjoyed the risks taken in "Machine" more). Steinberg is a brilliant writer: Her prose is part poetry, part lyric, part vivid description, part sociological exploration, but always really captivating.

[Michael Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

One thinks one knows what is going on here but one doesn't know not really. One gets a glimpse of family dynamics but one isn't sure that is the real answer. So one keeps reading and some of what occurs makes sense and then a doctor steps in and yes, it makes sense, but does it really. Are these interlinked stories. Is this a novel. Is it all meant to be understood as a metaphor, even when we are told there are no metaphors and neither are there question marks when sentences are actually questions. Oh well, we'll probably get it in the end, we hope.

[Zuly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The circularity is sometimes difficult to read because it's she did/she didn't, she was/she wasn't, he said/he didn't, it happened/or not. It's always making the edge the place. I liked these stories. The author can't get away from her act or her performance because you choose to do one thing or another. But what if you can't choose one? I guess you lay on the charm because the other woman in the room knows the need.

[derek allard · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is some very interesting, lyrical and at times poetic writing here, but it feels more like a log of someone overcoming daddy issues than unique short stories. I tend not to be a fan of vaguely veiled autobiographical stories, especially those heavily look at me focused. If you like that, though, this may be the book for you.

[Sarah Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved this read. never really done a book with separate stories and was worried how i would feel about meaning left for interpretation. i very much enjoyed it. don’t know if it’s something i’ll continue with but i really resonated with the feelings in some of these stories and how the words do just make sense by connection of womanhood. would recommend!!

[Banuta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steinberg has a unique style and writes as if the paper in her hands is a forest fire. Cowboys is an especially powerful read, no wonder it won a prize. She circles around to the same themes, which waters it all down for me. Innovative, fierce.