Venus of Chalk

what can i say? the thing that makes me love a novel is when i feel invested in the characters, the way that i am in the lives of my friends and family--cheering them on, identifying with their pains and achievements, all of that. and this book has that. in spades. but more--oh, i don't know what to say. it's got these details, about stuff that has profoundly affected me and my actual real life friends, fat hatred, homophobia, etc, but it's all handled in such a beautiful and ordinary and textured way. my review isn't doing it justice, you should just read it. really. it's beautiful.

I loved Venus of Chalk. Its fearless depiction of what it's like to be on the receiving end of deep social hatred and casual cruelty made me sting with recognition. But I was more thrilled by the wild worlds, emotional and physical, Carline finds herself in as a result. Because Stinson is able to imagine the life of her protagonist outside of the facile constraints pop psychology puts around the psyches of fat people, she renders a response to hatred that manages to be both fearless in its examination of pain and profound in its discovery of wondrous possibilities for grace in both the familiar and the unknown. Carline is an unforgettable character, so vividly drawn that it's hard to remember why others in her life perceive her as mundane. And the richness of the places and people in which she finds love made me feel more hopeful about the world, a rare thing these days.

Susan Stinson has written yet another lyrical piece of literature that deals with the sublime in everyday life. Her protagonist, Carline, responds to an an act of mundane and profoundly disturbing bigotry by hopping on a south bound bus. The domestic, courageous, deliciously flawed, Carline is a trip in herself. And she leads us to a cast of equally interesting characters in a story stiched with elegant care.

Susan Stinson, author of FAT GIRL DANCES WITH ROCKS, has crafted another quirky and fascinating novel, this one about a woman named Carline whose seemingly well-ordered life cracks in two one night when she is accosted by cigarette-flicking young toughs. With her lover, Lilian, out of town at an important poetry slam, Carline has no one to help her deal with this new indignity, and she finds herself falling into an emotional whirlpool from which she doesn't know how to escape. Carline is a woman of size - in other words, she is extremely fat. "Fat. It always came back to that... Vicious comments on the street, carefully worded references to `professional appearance' in job reviews, suddenly masked looks on the faces of friends; at this moment, hatred was all I could see, all I could breathe, all I was" (p. 20). A crisis looms over her life. Carline works as an administrator in a home economics program and specializes in pamphlets that help homemakers. Despite distributing information and assistance to women on five continents, Carline is dismayed that so few people pay attention to the details that are critically important to her. She is thwarted because "(p)eople who thought home economics was just pie crusts and vacuuming occupied every station in life; they outnumbered, perhaps, those who believed home economics no longer existed" (p. 15). In her own little home economics world, Carline has barely let into her consciousness the fact that her job doesn't seem meaningful, nor does much of her life. It is as if she has let her extra weight insulate her from true feeling, preventing any awareness to permeate and spur her toward needed change. So when Carline is accosted by the young toughs and her fragile sense of self is knocked completely askew, she stews for a day. Then her aunt Frankie from Chalk, Texas calls to report the death of a dear friend. Carline quits her job, packs a bag, and takes off on a bus trip with two odd fellows, Mel, who usually rides the bus with her, and Tucker, the driver, who is taking the old bus across the country to Dallas where it can be auctioned. The trip Carline takes is both internal and external, and little of it went at all like I expected. I don't want to ruin the surprises of the story, but suffice to say that there are several unexpected turns, each of which causes Carline to come closer and closer to confronting her own fears and pain and anguish. It takes her a long time to come to grips with the fact that she has "kept going under, shaking myself out of it, then falling again into fear and self-hate. The worse part was that it seemed so ordinary. I needed to stop" (p. 179). The tale of this journey "to stop" is filled with good writing, gold nuggets of description, and insightful narrative. The author has offered up a real jewel of a novel, featuring a character at times awkward, at times selfish, but ultimately compelling and sympathetic as she moves forward in her quest for understanding. Stinso

There are many things I love about this book. It is uncomfortable and brutally honest and raw in the way that a night in the desert draws the brilliant colors out of the stars one can't see even in a city. I loved the experience of reading it. I loved the surprise of identifying very personally with a character so very different from me. I loved the intensity and the tenderness between the characters, between the words themselves, and in a very powerful and strange way, between the author and her reader. I cannot say it better than Elizabeth McCracken said it: "I am an enormous fan of Susan Stinson's work, and, as a fan, consider it my duty to help more and more people know about its wonders: I can think of no-one who writes with more love, passion, and precision about the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the soul, and that nebulous (often neglected) intersection of body and soul. She writes extraordinary love stories, with inteligence and generocity and a wild imagination."