Wendy Brenner's "Large Animals in Everyday Life"

Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner

Case Study presented by Chelsea Hatfield

Wendy Brenner

Received her BA at Oberlin College, and MFA at the University of Florida

Awards include: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Flannery O'Connor Award, North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, UNCW Graduate Mentor Award, Henfield Award, and AWP Intro Award

Table of Contents

The Round Bar______________A

A Little Something___________B+

The Oysters_________________C- 

The Child___________________A

Success Story_______________B-

Easy______________________D-

The Reverse Phone Book______C

Undisclosed Location________C+

Guest Speaker______________C-

Dream, Age Twenty-Eight_____B

I Am the Bear_______________A-

The Round Bar (A)

            “The Round Bar” is the first story you read in Brenner’s collection of short stories titled “Large Animals in Everyday Life”. This story follows a woman who loves animals and loves men.  She spends most of her time at a bar called the Round Bar where she meets an interesting array of characters including a country singer who she falls madly in love with, a widowed Maine lobsterman, a woman with interesting chest tattoos, two brothers who frequent the bar, a man who looks like Jesus, an art librarian who she has a relationship with, and a twelve year old girl she meets at a hotel pool.

            This story is the first example readers are presented with an interchanging timeline.  Each paragraph presents us with a different point in the narrator’s life involving men, such as the art librarian and country singer, and when animals were an important part of her life, such as when she used a snake as she did a gypsy dance in a school talent show and a man who owns two distinctly different Labradors in characteristics. There are also the different scenarios she faces with the different characters at the bar, and her final scene at the hotel with the young girl.

            Brenner goes into specific detail of the scenarios the narrator goes through.  Each paragraph could be considered their own shorter story, and could be expanded into other, completely different stories of their own.  The timelines connect like a puzzle, with each piece a different paragraph, and the ending being the finishing piece to the puzzle of the narrator’s life.  The story is fun, different, and tells an unconventional story of a woman at a bar, her thought process with each character, and how she handles both her love and platonic life throughout the story. This story leaves you with questions in the end, but not confusing ones, but rather ones that make you contemplate on the narrator and her choice of actions with the people she surrounds herself with.           

The Child (A)

            Brenner’s “The Child” is a great example of the weird and unusual style she uses throughout all of her short stories.  This story is about a child who is afraid of everything, her parents who are trying to help her get through her fears, the blasé grandmother who is very unemotional and apathetic, and the “passionate” grandmother and her thoughts about the child. The story focuses mostly on the interaction of the child and the life of the passionate grandmother. 

            “The Child” jumps back and forth from different scenarios between characters, and different timelines of their scenarios. These are disjointed events that connect later in the story. The reader is presented with the different scenarios where the child is frightened and bawling, except when she meets a large dog that she creates a bond with. The child is then fascinated with invisible dog leashes, which is a leash that looks like the dog is invisible, so the leash floats in mid-air.  We jump from time to time to the passionate grandmother’s thoughts and the flashbacks to her life when she was married, and how she plans to be spontaneous for the child’s Christmas present.  The story jumps from situation to situation, including a therapy visit, building a dollhouse, visiting a catacomb tour, meeting the large dog, and the child pushing to know the passionate grandmother’s age. 

Each situation seems very random, and uses unusual and weird diction in its descriptions. There are not large spaces used to separate each situation, only semi-connected new paragraphs. Illustrative spaces, those being three dots, are only used once when separating a situation involving the child and passionate grandmother within the story. While the changing and random situations may confuse some readers, Brenner writes in such a way that the most random parts still come back full circle to other characters and the other parts of the story. None of the characters are named, but are given lower case titles, some with adjectives.  These include the child, blasé grandmother, passionate grandmother, the mother and the father.  These are the “names” or “labels” that are given to the characters when they are referred to. This creates a different kind of connection to the characters when describing them without having a name. This makes the story a fascinating example of a moving timeline within a story that reconnects in other areas of said story.     

             

Easy (D-)

            This story follows a woman who is on a road trip to return home to her widowed mother.  The story jumps back and forth between memories of her past, with her partner Charlie, and memories with her mother. These memories include her mother’s possessive nature after her father died, and how she followed the narrator all throughout her school life.  The story jumps some other seemingly random scenarios between when she is alone, versus talking about moments with Charlie or being in the car driving home.

 However, these memories jump around way too much, and become very confusing. There are some sentences within the story that make no connection to the paragraph it is structured in.  Very few illustrative spaces are used to separate sections while other new sections are just split by new paragraphs but are in a separate part of time in the story. Many of the sentences are unnecessarily long, as if they were stream of consciousness from the first person narrator.

The characters emotions are very bland, and the story does not progress them well. The love story between the main character and Charlie is very dry and makes very little progress.  Brenner tries to make these characters seem different and quirky, but they just fall flat in the end of the story. The choice of diction does not bring life to the characters or their stories.  The constant change from complex and long sentences, to very short and simple adds extra confusion to the flow of the story when trying to connect what the narrator is trying to say.            

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