An Invisible Sign of Her Own (Aimee Bender)

I am a huge fan of Aimee Bender’s work: her first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, and her latest collection, Willful Creatures. This is her first full-length project and it was actually published between the two sets of stories. This was a good book. It was. If anyone else wrote it, I would write a nice, fluffy and downy-fresh review and leave it at that. But this is a Bender and so I cannot be so simple. Frankly, I know that this is not as good as her previous work.

Hmm. You may ask, Why? Well, for one, her other work is incredibly hard to live up to in my mind. Her unique imagination and crisp style. Each tale is an encapsulated whole. Her ideas are so wild that maybe it is better that way. Maybe those ideas don’t have the elasticity to stretch over the frame of a traditional novel. In other words, the strange wild and wacky world she usually succeeds at creating wears thin in points to show the real world poking through from underneath.

An Invisible Sign of My Own is the story of a 20-year-old young woman who understands the world through mathematics. She also lives her life every moment with her father’s illness in mind, an illness that is not really a disease at all but more of a colorless gloom of depression and surrender. So she too makes a habit of surrendering everything. In fact, she is an expert quitter. Everything she finds herself liking or growing attached to she immediately gives up—by force if necessary. For example, in order to give up sex, she sickens herself by eating soap thereby linking dirty sex and nauseating clean at the same time.

I do like the premise behind the title. It is based off the actions of the neighbor who also happens to be the girl’s former math teacher. He wears a different wax number on a string around his neck each day based upon his mood. If it’s a wretched day where he can barely get out of bed, he might sport a 7. If he falls in love or goes on vacation, his number could rise as high as 80. The main character, understanding his system, can understand and sympathize with his mood. But who is paying attention to her invisible signs? In truth, no one can see the number, the grade, the ranking of our feelings behind the mask of our faces, making math the universal language of… what? Not humanity. Of isolation? Of over-simplification? Maybe. An interesting concept.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the book. It flew by like the rest of her writing and I recommend it for a bit of light, fun reading. I just have a feeling that this mathematical main character will not have the sticking power of other bender creations—the de-evolving boyfriend, the “mother-fucker,” etc…