Review by New York Times Review
MONEY IS OSTENSIBLY the fuel that powers Karen E. Bender's new collection, "Refund." In the title story, a couple falsely advertises a TriBeCa sublet just before 9/11 to pay for a fancy nursery school. In "Reunion," a woman impulsively buys an unseen plot of land on credit. Smaller risks prove to be, if not turning points, then those moments remembered in relief as emblematic of the Before - splurging on beef Wellington for supper, say, or setting up a kids' lemonade stand - by those now living in the After. The theme works as an organizing tenet, but Bender's subtler preoccupation is the eroding effect of emotional want. With the exception of a few stories set in New York and Los Angeles, the neighborhoods that Bender's characters inhabit are notable only for their Target- and Walmart-accessible featurelessness. Home is "a community splashed onto an area that should have remained desert" or "a midsized city in South Carolina." These are places "people ended up," not places they move to with any conviction. Businesses fail (in one story it's website construction; in another, appliance repair), and collaterally, so do marriages. Bender confronts these day-to-day ignominies with dispassion and humor: "Her husband could not find anything to put on his lunch sandwich and, with a sort of martyred defiance, slapped margarine on bread. 'What a man does to save money,' he murmured." The humor mitigates the loss in these stories, in which unloved children become unloved adults, attempting to get on with lives neither the world nor their immediate families seem to care about. Ultimately, the sense of dispossession Bender's characters face turns out to be more profound than anything geography could create, originating again and again in blunt parental rejection. In "The Third Child," an emotionally deprived girl who has adopted a neighboring family is capriciously forbidden the solace their company provides. In "Theft," an aging Hollywood con artist recalls arriving with her sister in Los Angeles as teenagers, "armed with an address for an aunt they would never meet" - because she doesn't exist; she has been invented out of whole cloth by the father who abandoned them. The one overtly successful character in the collection, the multimillionaire inventor of a beyond-the-pale game show called "Anything for Money," dotes on his granddaughter in an effort to make up for his own negligent parenting. Bender sometimes moves too quickly to a universalizing remark. In "The Loan Officer's Visit," an otherwise affecting story about a woman whose aged parents visit after decades of apathy, the narrator, meeting them at the airport, observes, "The security crew was looking for anger when really the dangerous emotion was love." Later she wonders, "How long would we have, on earth, together?" In "Refund," Bender's protagonist belabors the 9/11 theme: "What did one owe for being alive?" These remarks become tics - they suggest a desire to inject profundity but too often have the opposite effect, prodding the reader away from the story toward a contemplation of Big Themes and undermining the accumulation of resonant detail. Bender is best when she is most specific: "Here was the Olive Garden where my husband and I ate numerous garlic knots and had a stupid fight over the amount of time each was able to get to the gym." Or, describing a husband who plans to leave his wife and small children: "He said he wanted to go somewhere clean." Forget the oracular pronouncements; that one offhand comment shows Bender understands worlds about marriage and emotional need. Businesses fail in these stories, and collaterally, so do marriages. CAITLIN MACY is the author of a novel, "The Fundamentals of Play," and a story collection, "Spoiled."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 22, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Bender's (A Town of Empty Rooms, 2013) collection of stories appears to be about money, something we all need, work for, spend, misuse, even throw away. In Reunion, a woman is scammed out of money she can't afford to lose by an old high-school crush. In Anything for Money, a host of a game show on which people do crazy stunts for money finds himself doing anything he can to get his ailing daughter a heart transplant. And in the title story, a struggling couple sublet their apartment right before 9/11 and find that the woman who rented it is demanding more than just her deposit back. But Bender's stories are about more than money. She portrays people who are broken and asking themselves the same question in different ways am I worthy of being loved? Bender's tales are stark, heart wrenching, quirky, and sometimes end without closure. But they all work together, as Bender leads us to a unifying conclusion: you can't put a price on human life or love.--Kubisz, Carolyn Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Money and its mysteries-how to get it, keep it, steal it, and do without it-link the stories in this collection, but so do the mysteries of having children or being one. Bender's youthful characters are imperious creatures who leave their parents bewildered, exhausted, and wrung out with love. Parenting, of course, is linked to money: only parents in the middle class-and Bender (A Town of Empty Rooms) makes it clear how tenuous that status is-notice when their children are "experimenting with disdain," even if they don't how to respond. (The poor are too busy; the rich have outsourced their child rearing.) Her characters struggle to identify the right thing to do, and wonder how to do it given dire circumstances. There are some astonishing characters in this collection-the elderly grifter in "Theft," the ailing child in "Anything for Money," and the sisters in "A Chick from My Dream Life"-but most of the stories are fairly low-key, taking up not the diagnosis but the wait for it, or the sudden anger at a neighbor's child. And though readers may sometimes crave bigger or more conclusive endings, the stories' strengths stem from Bender's beautiful writing and her ability to convey the wonder and dread of ordinary life, the things we might notice-whether with terror or with joy-if we weren't too busy worrying about paying the bills. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In these 13 stories, Bender (A Town of Empty Rooms, 2013, etc.) showcases families that "endure" in both senses of the word: suffer patiently and carry on despite enormous travail.The title storyconcerning a sublet in Tribeca that goes horribly wrong for both the struggling couple renting it out and the woman who takes it beginning in September 2001epitomizes the high anxiety that permeates Bender's stories. The New York setting is unusual, though. The book's landscape is mostly drab fast-food- and mall-saturated suburbia, often in Southern states where displaced northerners, usually Jewish, have arrived under financial duress. In "Free Lunch," two New Yorkers in North Carolina are as uncomfortable around a Hasidic rabbi and his wife as they are among their Christian neighbors; in "The Third Child," an overwhelmed mother, distraught to find herself pregnant again, nevertheless acts generously toward a neighbor child, only to be viciously snubbed by the girl's Baptist mother. Family and financial tensions often combine. In "For What Purpose?," a woman whose parents died in a car crash experiences a brief sense of belonging with work mates until she's let go. In both "What the Cat Said" and "This Cat," the family pet becomes the metaphor, or scapegoat, for disappointment and dysfunction. "Anything for Money" offers the book's only wealthy character, who becomes the most desperate when his daughter needs a new heart. The first two stories are among the least depressing. In "Reunion," a woman goes off the deep end, buying a phony beach lot from an old boyfriend, but her marriage survives. In "Theft," an aging scam artist and a jilted young woman forge a friendship that improves them both. And the volume's gentlest story, "The Sea Turtle Hospital," concerning a young teacher's kindness to a kindergartner, takes place in the aftermath of a school shooting. Although her tone can veer toward bitterness, Bender excels at characters on the edge of despair, particularly mothers who resent the children they love. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
