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A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

This was the second book of stories from Amy Bloom, and I had fun rereading parts of it over spring break. Not everything works. The triangle in "Rowing to Eden" doesn't fully hold my attention. And the woman who adopts a badly disfigured child as a way of coping with grief? This feels a bit "on the nose."

But I like the shocking last story, "The Story," and the fun of being inside the mind of a crafty anti-heroine. I like the woman who sleeps with the husband of the president of her local synagogue, and contemplates helping him to commit suicide. (He is slowly dying of a disease.) I like the girl who stops speaking because her mom is really ill. People are in dire straits, in these stories. That's often a source of black humor.

Then, the title story, about Jane, whose daughter wants gender confirmation surgery. A story that came out before people knew much about the experiences of transgender men and women (and it surely uses dated language):

Once you know there are transsexuals, you see them everywhere. Short, pear-shaped men. Tall, knobby women. When you walk out of the waiting room at the North American Gender Identity Clinic, everyone looks peculiar. You flip through magazines and think, hmmm, Leo DiCaprio? There's something about him. And Jamie Lee Curtis? Look at those legs.

In her own mirror Jane now looks odd to herself. Maybe she's morphing; her feet look funny, her shoulders seem as wide as Marcella's, and there is a dark downy space where her hairline seems to be receding. Maybe she'll cross over before her daughter does, except she'll look like Don Knotts, and her daughter will look like one of Calvin Klein's young men....

This is funny and unusual; it puts the experience of a middle-aged mom front and center. Again, her daughter is considering surgery to correct her gender. The mom, through love and empathy, begins to wonder about her *own* body. Who is *actually, fully* comfortable in a body? Maybe we're all a bit transgender. Celebrities, women with receding hairlines. All of this seems like a plausible report on what this particular woman would be thinking in this moment. There's a sense of wonder--seeing the world anew. Also, when one member of a family goes through a major change, *every* member of the family goes through a change. Bloom captures this smartly--as Jill Soloway would also capture it, years later, in "Transparent."

Bloom is reliable for funny, incisive, elegant, and startling sentences. This slim collection of stories is maybe her best book. Food for thought....
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