Animal Acts

Mazza's "Animal Acts" pursues a singular vision of confused, sometimes mad, sexual desire while exploring the warped trope of artistic expression. Many of Mazza's characters are artists and musicians, characterized in-story by bursts of abstruse dialogue and terse exposition. Particularly disgusting and affecting is the opening scene of "From Hunger", where a woman eats paint. "She put the next two fistfuls [of paint] into her mouth, trying to swallow them... She retched and blue dribbled down her chin." While a scene of such intrinsic ridiculousness might easier been penned self-indulgently, Mazza manages to give us such fragmentary, hallucinatory snippets of the character that the story takes us almost to the delusional depths of the character herself. Several pieces utilize jarring changes in tense and inspired variations on the traditional short-story form to create their unique textures, the most striking of this kind being the title story, which is something like a play and something like a script but neither. Intermittently these flourishes and sometimes skeletal ambiguities seem vacuous, or there merely as flourishes, but the mood conjured is always lively and filled with the sound of surprise. The structure of each piece is tightly woven, but superficially sometimes having such disparate elements, that the reader is forced into complicity and interpretation. The broad ideas of "art", "music", and animal behaviors presented throughout are like metaphorical springboards, allowing for broad and rewarding readings of the various stories.

Animal Acts is a concoction of stories dealing with the intimate human relationship. Mazza shows stark contrasts and comparisons of men, women and animals within the individual stories. "Dead Dog" shows Lea, a self-respecting gym teacher, whose main relationship with Laddy, her aging dog who dies, reflects the differences in their clashing worlds and her acute dependency on him. "Animals Don't Think About It" is a story of Tara Katz, a painter whose vague memory starts to take a toll on her relationship with a chess-fanatic sculptor boyfriend. The title story, a story of a woman trying to attract an unwilling man, demonstrates the narrator's involvement with the story in play format. "Erasable Ink" shows a poignant loneliness existing in the character of Robert which manifests itself through his drawings, imagination and his inspection of Michael, his coworker who gets the girls. The plots seem, on the surface, absurd but the author manages to paint a convincing portrait about the characters and why these people do what they do in these relationships.The complexities are expressed plainly, even subtly, through detail and dialogue. It is only after reading the stories that everything somewhat falls together and not necessarily in a mystery novel-kind-of-way. The reader gains perspective on these unique but in a way, familiar relationships. The flow of Mazza's words and how she manages to exhibit emotions through actions and not thoughts is a must-study for beginning fiction writers. The aura of this book conveys the meaningful emotions dealt by men and especially which makes it timeless.