Too much happiness?
Elizabeth Crane hits high and low in You Must Be This Happy to Enter
By Kate Rockwood
Published: February 25th, 2008 | 9:09pm
When Elizabeth Crane burst onto the literary scene five years ago she was heralded as a bold, undeniably unique talent—a female writer to put on the shelf beside the literary likes of George Saunders and Dave Eggers. And rightly so: her two short story collections, All This Heavenly Glory and When the Messenger is Hot, mixed an experimental writing style with a playful, often absurdist sense of humor, packed with plenty of emotional reverberation.
But while Crane’s earlier works applied her skillful style to the duel downers of failed relationships and death, her latest collection, You Must Be This Happy to Enter is, well, happy, a paradoxically more difficult emotion to write deft, nuanced stories about. The result is an uneven collection—alternately dull, saccharine, and beautifully raw—that’s better cherry-picked than read in its entirety. (Disappointed fans can blame Crane’s recent marriage and writing success for her cripplingly sunny disposition.)
“I! Love! My Life! My life is awesome and great! I have all the things anyone would ever want!” kick-starts the literally exclamations-only “My Life is Awesome! And Great!,” in which a woman convinces herself that going on a reality TV show is the key to a happy life. It’s a humdrum piece with which to open the book, easily outshined by the whip-smart and more subdued “Betty the Zombie.” When the titular housewife travels to Joann Fabrics and is bit by a zombie, becoming one herself, she moves into a Starting Over-style house for a bit of televised life coaching. Her roommates have problems of their own, including murdering, loneliness, overspending, and severe clutter, and they work through their issues for the benefit of the cameras with insane group activities like Electric Fence Limbo, “which is exactly what it sounds like.”
Reality TV isn’t the only pop plague to come under the crosshairs of Crane’s sharp wit and biting humor. The cult of celebrity, self-help psychology, hipster irony, academia, and gentrification all make frequent and easy targets for quick evisceration. And the collection earns kudos for its broad range, from magical realism to memoir-ish internal first persons, though its misses, like its hits, can be found at both ends. In “Emmanuel,” a story about a woman whose baby transforms overnight into Ethan Hawke, the mechanics of magic are frustratingly in-flux, obscuring Crane’s message. Meanwhile “Donovan’s Closet,” about a woman drawn to spend large stretches of time in her boyfriend’s lemon-scented closet, is as real—and flat—as a story could be.
Some stories, though, positively sing. The collection’s final piece, “Promise,” starts simply with, “I will feed you sugar.” It is a list of promises from a woman to the baby she will one day adopt, fraught with all the hope, anxiety, identity crisis, and semi-ridiculous planning one would expect. It’s a wonderfully universal and positively singular love song, sure to find its way into future anthologies. The narrator promises, toward the end, “I will do all of this. I will do none of this. I will love you so hard.”
Likewise, a contradiction between masterful and messy can be found side-by-side in the stories of this glittering, if uneven, collection. Anyone new to Crane’s sly, slightly absurdist style would do better to pick up one of her earlier, stronger works. But for those willing to sift past a few disappointing stories, there are true gems to be had here.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
You Must Be This Happy to Enter
By Elizabeth Crane
183 pages
List price: $14.95
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