Mannequin and Wife by Jen Fawkes, and: Tales the Devil Told Me by Jen Fawkes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mannequin and Wife by Jen Fawkes, and: Tales the Devil Told Me by Jen Fawkes Laura Jok (bio) mannequin and wife Jen Fawkes Louisiana State University Press https://lsupress.org/books/detail/mannequin-and-wife/ 210 pages; Print, $24.95 tales the devil told me Jen Fawkes Press 53 https://www.press53.com/short-fiction/tales-the-devil-told-me-by-jen-fawkes 196 pages; Print, $17.95 Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me, the story collections of Jen Fawkes, demonstrate the breadth and depth of the author's imagination to be, like her fabulist fictions, nothing short of remarkable. Fawkes is such a master of sustaining our enchantment, I could not resist reading the stories—and both of the books—one right after the other and then looking forward to more. Delays resulting from COVID-19 caused Tales the Devil Told Me to be released shortly after Mannequin and Wife, and their coincidence only displays Fawkes's rare gift for developing narrative momentum, novelty, and richness across a substantial repertoire—Mannequin numbers twenty stories, Tales eleven—of short fiction. The stories share a commitment to suspense, musical sentences, retold tales, and the fantastic through a constantly shifting and evolving blend of conceit, allegory, and realism that is never quite what we would anticipate. Tales the Devil Told Me and Mannequin and Wife read beautifully together, and seem, indeed, to finish each other's sentences. Tales, originally the author's MFA thesis, revisits canonical and archetypal stories from the Brothers Grimm to the penny dreadful to Shakespeare with a focus on their villains. The Tales retell from refreshing perspectives and reimagine the untold sides of the story, and at the same time, insightfully mine the source material for the universal experience or sentiment that makes the original deservedly archetypal [End Page 73] and reset it in a new realistic or hyperreal context that allows us to experience, in the familiar story, the shivers of recognition for heroes and villains alike, and the revelatory potential of the tale itself. Fawkes reminds us throughout Tales that interpretation can serve as a mechanism of forgiveness that reveals, or empathetically invents, our common humanity. In "Dynamics," the sinister and arcane codes of Professor Moriarty can be read, and rewritten, as a romance by the young mathematician determined to love him, who performs a similar feat for her father, the estranged failed theoretician who leaves her his papers. Rumpelstiltskin wants only to be known and loved like anyone else; Medusa is bitter because men become immobilized by her stunning appearance and can proceed no further in their relationship; Mowgli wishes a better life for his son, who grows up as wild as the tiger whom he reluctantly killed to protect his future and his descendancy. A gem of this collection, "Never, Never" asks not only that its Peter Pan figure, the aimless stoner narrator, grow up and get a real job but delivers this message through his stepfather, a draconian embarrassment who is, on top of everything else, Captain Hook. The pirate reinvents himself as a husband and a humble civil servant who turns his talents to sorting mail and spearing work orders on the end of his hook and appearing in full buccaneer regalia on his weekends. His paternal admonishments and advice, rendered in platitude and pirate speech, may sound laugh-out-loud funny—"What are ye going to do with yer life?"—but the insight of the story hides in plain sight, in how we, like the narrator, can initially dismiss Hook as amusing, ridiculous, the villain and the stepfather figure that we all know, only to be staggered later by his wisdom. Hook, like his stepson, like Peter Pan, like every one of us by extension of the metaphor, has learned from hard-won experience to move past juvenile evasions of responsibility on his voyages and obsession with the revenge for the wrongs done to him in youth, by recognizing his younger self in the angry stepson who shares the first name of the boy who maimed him. After Hook dies, Peter the narrator finally realizes what he was trying to tell him all along: to retain...