Sara Jaffe Understands Us Better Than We Do
Luke Alchin-Scolnick
Book Review
A review of Sara Jaffe’s Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
Existing in the modern world, and particularly in modern America, means grappling with identity. It drives us, defines us, boxes us in. We’d like it to be clear and controlled, but often it ends up messy. It’s the crux of all of the turmoil we experience, and still it’s the heart of all that’s good. It not only affects us on the scale of the individual, but it creates dividing lines for the communities we live in. We can spend years–decades–crafting an identity, or at least attempting to, and have it fall on the deaf ears and blind eyes of everyone around us. We can make immense effort to distance ourselves from identities that weren’t ours to choose in the first place, only to find we’re seemingly unable to separate ourselves from them in the end. In Sara Jaffe’s America–which is really just the America we all share, stripped bare–it feels like there’s so much to do, and really nothing we can do about it. Hurricane Envy lives here with us too.
Sara Jaffe understands us better than we do. This has been self-evident since her 2015 debut novel Dryland put its finger directly on the pulse of queer youth in America. Her latest offering moves into the short prose, though this shift was anything but recent. Many of the pieces in Hurricane Envy were written years ago, some over a decade ago, but this hasn’t stopped them from reading and feeling like they were written in the immediate moment. All 15 shorts in this collection are raging bulls in both their depiction of modernity and in their relentless style, written confidently and leaving no word unused. In a reading and discussion of Hurricane Envy at the North Figueroa Bookshop in Los Angeles, Jaffe emphasized the ideas that flow through the book: messiness and control in both identity and being alive. Readers are confronted with these ideas in myriad settings and places, as Jaffe walks us through different little pockets of life where these clashes can be found.
Out of the gate, Jaffe rips a portal into the complexity and disorientation in each character’s life and invites her readers to share the experience with her. It’s in the first story in this collection, “Burning Earth”, that Jaffe initially puts her prescience on full display for readers, hitting on an idea that will be brought up again a number of times throughout: How do we continue living as usual while there’s so much disorder around us? In this story we hear from a creative writing student tasked with delivering a ‘reading response’ about the protagonist and plot of the John Cheever short story titled “The Swimmer” (also a 1968 Burt Lancaster film of the same name), who can’t help but think about the topography of the story and effects of the BP oil spill, which had occurred roughly a year before this story was originally written. The writing assignment is ostensibly simple for someone taking writing seriously, but the world around the task makes it feel impossible, like the weight of the world has suddenly come crashing down onto the student’s shoulders, and they need to do something about it. But what is there to do? How does this student’s worldview inform their wants and thoughts? Over and over again, Hurricane Envy posits this existential question to its readers, asking them sincerely.
The story immediately following, “Baby In A Bar”, deals with the ideas of messiness and identity that also permeate the rest of the book. A mother describes taking her baby into–you guessed it–a bar, after feeling as though the two of them had been pursued for some time. The mother’s internal dialogue takes us through all of the possibilities for misperception that come with motherhood: Do I look the appropriate age to have a baby? Do I look the part in their physical presentation? Would the people I previously socialized with approve of my status of being a mother? Do I resent this life I never really wanted, but felt like I had to have? These questions drive to the heart of the story, which climaxes in a literal test of identity as a mother. “Baby In A Bar” is expertly crafted to employ the use of very real happenings to bring out the visceral feeling of loneliness and isolation within one’s identity. Don’t we all succumb to some sort of societal expectation, sometimes even when they don’t fit us at our truest?
Perhaps the story that works best as a representative for the entire collection, “Unsafe Is Not A Feeling” directly depicts the search for perception which underlies all of the stories in Hurricane Envy. The narrator and their therapist discuss fears, identity, particularities, confusion, and the general ability to be seen. The narrator’s thoughts are winding, and their fears are complicated, but they all exist under the same umbrella as every feeling of every other character in this collection. How did we get to be the people we are? Does any of it make sense? How do our social statuses and racial identities shape all the rest of it? Jaffe’s winding prose takes us through the valleys of each thoughtline and subsequent interruption, and on and on again. The quick-hitting questions pose and rework each interrogation of self to peel back further and further in both our narrator and our reader, before bringing us to the heart of it all. The journey to the middle of the self is, as Sara Jaffe would write it, a long track of conviction and little identifying factors that would otherwise sit dormant inside us all.
The minutia is where Jaffe thrives in these stories. None of them run longer than 25 pages, yet finishing one puts the same weight in the chest of its reader as a 500-page novel. It’s easy to fall into the shoes of each story’s narrator, as the lessons and tales of each one are widely applicable while remaining specific to a disfigured American culture that produces each character’s climate. Many of Jaffe’s readers will understand the feeling of sitting through a confusing therapy appointment, or having a confrontational debate with a neighbor about Palestinian rights. It may be a rarity to experience riding a bike with a trash bag full of live crabs on your back, but Jaffe’s prose puts the jagged, scratching claws of a crab directly onto the reader’s spine as the narrator searches desperately for someone to listen and care about them. Hurricane Envy is a showcase in powerful short prose, living in the abstract with tangible story foundations that allow the stories to float into the headspace of each character and back to the reader as a mirror.
Identity, perception and misperception, desire, and reflection are the ideas that animate how we live and move through the world; nobody understands that quite like Sara Jaffe. She knows how to laugh through it all, without removing any of the gravity. She knows how to articulate feelings that often go unsaid. And above all, she knows how we all feel. Hurricane Envy is a titan of short prose, and only further cements Jaffe as a singularity in contemporary fiction. Just don’t call her a storyteller.
Hurricane Envy
Sara Jaffe
Rescue Press
188pp
$20
Luke Alchin-Scolnick is a writer and communications professional from Los Angeles, CA. He tends to favor cultural analyses, media criticism, book and film review, and short fiction. His work has appeared in L’Esprit Literary Review, TRUE Magazine, his Substack page The Backshift, and other places.
L'Esprit Literary Review 