Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: "Cat Person" and Other Stories, Gallery/Scout Press, 2019.
Cat Person (New Yorker)
What It Felt Like When “Cat Person” Went Viral
From the author of “Cat Person”—“the short story that launched a thousand theories” (The Guardian)—comes Kristen Roupenian's highly anticipated debut, a compulsively readable collection of short stories that explore the complex—and often darkly funny—connections between gender, sex, and power across genres.
You Know You Want This brilliantly explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.
Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”
Roupenian’s solid debut is highlighted by moments of startling insight into the hidden—and often uncomfortable—truths underneath modern relationships. “Cat Person,” which caused a sensation when it was first published in the New Yorker in 2017, is an unrelentingly, almost painfully, honest and perfectly rendered dramatization of the millennial heterosexual relationship and all its attendant anxieties and violences. The other stories, about sex, power, and personhood, range from the highly conceptual—in “Scarred,” a woman magically summons what she thinks is her heart’s desire, before she realizes the sacrifices one must make to truly attain it—to the aggressively realistic—in one of the best stories, “The Good Guy,” readers are immersed into the train wreck thought process of Ted, who is certifiably and pathologically not like other guys, except, of course, that he is actually like so many guys. Another strong entry is “Death Wish,” in which a divorced man living in a motel meets a girl on Tinder; when she shows up at his motel room, she has an unusual and upsetting sexual request for him. Though some stories don’t land and rely too much on explication, there are some stellar moments of pithy clarity: In “Scarred,” upon summoning a way to cheat desire, the protagonist muses, “I had everything that could be wanted. I invented new needs just to satisfy.” This is a promising debut. - Publishers Weekly
When Roupenian’s “Cat Person” was published in the New Yorker, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon. It's unheard of for a short story to go viral, but "Cat Person"—through a combination of impossibly sharp writing and impossibly good timing—had done it. A year later, Roupenian's debut collection proves that success wasn’t a fluke.
The 12 visceral stories here range from uncomfortable to truly horrifying and are often—though not always—focused on the vicious contradictions of being female. Roupenian’s women are as terrified as they are terrifying; sometimes the violence comes to fruition and sometimes it doesn’t, but the possibility is always there, bubbling under the surface. In “Bad Boy,” which opens the book, a woman and her boyfriend take in a stray friend after a breakup and begin incorporating him into their sex life in increasingly sadistic ways. In “Sardines,” an 11-year-old girl—who, unlike most fictional 11-year-old girls, is depicted entirely without sentiment, big-nosed and meaty-breathed—makes a wish "for something mean" on a defective birthday candle and creates a monster. “Cat Person” and then “The Good Guy,” which follows it, both its companion and its opposite, are the heart of the collection—both chronologically and in spirit—as complementary investigations of gender and power. (Roupenian’s depictions of the dynamics between men and women are infinitely nuanced, but the very short version is: It’s real messed up.) “Cat Person” is told from the perspective of Margot, a college student, who's on a date with Robert, who is 34 and makes her feel at once very powerful and very small. “The Good Guy” follows Ted, a nice guy—who is not Robert but also not so different from him—whose relationships with women could be characterized as a dance of mutual contempt. (It is, of course, more complicated.) Some of the stories are drawn, with startling and nauseating detail, from life; others veer toward magical realism or nightmares. All of them, though, are united by Roupenian’s voice, which is unsparing and unpretentious and arrestingly straightforward, so that it feels, at times, less like you are reading and more like she is simply thinking for you.
Unsettling, memorable, and—maybe perversely—very, very fun.- Kirkus
Terrible things happen in Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This, a fact hinted at by the table of contents, which reads like a list of YA vampire novels: “Bad Boy,” “Death Wish,” “Scarred,” “Biter.” “I write horror stories,” the author told the Sunday Times last year. “The pull and push of revulsion and attraction is what the book revolves around.”
Roupenian is fascinated by the way power—in her stories, often bestowed by sex or magic—seesaws between people, temporarily elevating the lowly only to drop them back in the dirt where they belong. Her victims can sometimes gain enough leverage to become villains, but since they’re propelled by petty angers and relentless self-absorption, not even having the upper hand removes the taint of abjection. For Roupenian, human nature’s inherent ugliness is like gravity: briefly defiable yet inescapable. There are no heroes in this collection because there is no dignity. I think it is fair to call it a book “for our times.”
The opener, “Bad Boy,” is emblematic of what’s to come. A genderless couple is frustrated with their sad-sack friend, who keeps bumbling his way into bad relationships. Listening to him detail his latest breakup is “like listening to an alcoholic whine about being hungover.” But there’s something endearing about his spinelessness; he’s “like a sad little dog hungry for friendliness and praise.” The couple, it becomes clear, is like a different type of dog, one thirsty for blood. “We allowed ourselves to be irritable with him, to pick on him a bit,” they admit after the friend has become a more or less permanent houseguest. Passivity, especially when seasoned with self-pity, invites abuse, and the couple answers the call with escalating malice that culminates in a scene of extreme violence.
Most readers will probably identify with the couple before they become so monstrous. (If you’ve never met an infuriating milquetoast who can’t act in his own self-interest, the milquetoast may be you.) But who are these people who give their sadism such unusually free rein? We know something of their self-analysis (“We were chasing something inside of him that revolted us, but we were driven mad as dogs by the scent”), but little else. No one is given a proper name (which is also true of “Scarred” and “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone”) or placed in an identifiable location, year, or even a distinct body. There’s no hint of the outside world: no news, no politics, no jobs, no families. I associate those omissions with fairy tales more than horror stories, and given the former’s embrace of the macabre (the sliced-off toes, the eaten children, the sawed-out hearts), maybe “fabulist” more accurately identifies Roupenian’s style.
Roupenian traverses blatantly fantastical territory in “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone,” a story about a disconsolate princess accused of being “selfish and arrogant and spoiled” for failing to fall in love with a suitor. The only creature that beguiles her is an object made up of the title items: an upright thigh bone upon which a mirror and bucket are fastened and then covered by a black cloak, which somehow makes it pass as human. “You were looking at your own face reflected in this cracked mirror,” a royal adviser tells the princess after she’s mistaken a passionate night with the bucket—“kissing and joking and talking until dawn”—for the start of a relationship with a mysterious man. (There but for the grace of god go I.) She acquiesces to marriage with an actual man who loves her and wants her to be happy, but his attempts to integrate the trash contraption into their relationship backfire, badly. This could be a parable about how women are pushed to prioritize mates and family over pursuing a love affair with themselves, or about the delusions one indulges in when desperate for connection, or about how we can be selfish even when we think we’re acting out of selfless love. It may be a cautionary tale about polyamory, or it may be a tale with no agenda at all. The story is autological: It can mirror back whatever a reader might want to find.
The career-making “Cat Person,” too, is something of a mirror-and-bucket-and-thigh-bone creation. When it appeared in the New Yorker in 2017, it launched a slew of response articles and thousands of tweets at least in part because the story was easily received as validating the mood of the moment. Thanks to the #MeToo media frenzy, we were all primed to see a canny (or, at any rate, timely) commentary on sexual exploitation. (The story was the second-most-read New Yorker item that year, beaten by an article comprising first-person accounts from alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein.) “Cat Person” concerns the brief and fractured flirtation turned hookup between Margot, a college student, and Robert, a thirtysomething customer she meets at her movie theater job. Regardless of Robert’s seniority, both characters are immature and awkward. They exchange unremarkable and minorly pathetic obfuscations as they try to impress each other while protecting themselves, revealing little and assuming much. It ends, predictably, in lazy cruelty and disappointment. Their sex is bad, so Margot stops texting Robert after their single date, until she lets a friend speak on her behalf—“Hi im not interested in you stop textng me.” Robert obeys, until he sees Margot at a bar a month later, where she treats him badly, “like a mean girl,” mistaking the “sick and scared” quality of her regret and guilt as proof of an external threat.
While the sex in “Cat Person” was not rape (as fans were quick to aver), it was still rape-y, a term that indicates that one participant wasn’t enthusiastic about the sex before, during, or after. “He didn’t ‘force’ her to do anything,” read one typical article in the Washington Post. “But Robert is older than Margot . . . and therefore has the power.” Most Americans still believe bad sex damages women in a way it simply cannot damage men, so many readers gave Margot a pass for her poor behavior. Robert, on the other hand, became an irredeemable villain when he drunkenly texted Margot the last word of the story: “Whore.” (“There is nothing Margot can do” in response, a different Washington Post writer claimed, ludicrously. The dream of feminism is truly dead if women in 2018 literally have no possible retort while they are safe at home and a man texts them an unimaginative insult.)
Of course the world’s abundance of ambient misogyny lends men a sort of superpower when they denigrate women. But to say that Margot is better than Robert is not only to say very little, but also to miss the point. Here again is the “pull and push of revulsion and attraction.” To believe there is only one force brutally pushing and one blamelessly retreating is to believe a convenient fairy tale. A more valuable interrogation must take into account their collaboration in debasing each other and themselves, their swift abdication of integrity, their small hopes and larger sense of entitlement.
I liked “Cat Person” when it came out, but I found myself resisting You Know You Want This for two reasons. The first is that the back-and-forth dynamic Roupenian finds so fascinating rarely acquires a third dimension. Maybe this is OK; animation can be more entertaining than live action. But the stories’ vagueness ultimately struck me as less a feature than an unintentional bug, like the author wasn’t sure what to invent to fill these gaps and so convinced herself filling them wasn’t necessary. In “Sardines,” a birthday girl is granted her terrible wish for revenge, and the precipitating violation is referred to only as “The Incident.” In “Death Wish,” a girl arrives at her Tinder hookup’s motel with a mysterious suitcase, the contents of which are, pointedly, never revealed. Too many characters—the red-lipstick-wearing Brooklynite of “The Matchbox Sign,” the greedy narrator of “Scarred,” whose predominant characteristic seems to be “sociopath”—are like dolls dropped into a predetermined plot. I found this naked utility wearying rather than intriguing, though it should make for decent TV, where such gaps can be padded with facial expressions and music and sets. (HBO has already optioned the book; I expect a product akin to Black Mirror, flavored more with fantasy than science fiction.)
The second reason is that ugliness, especially sexual ugliness, can be deadening to read about as well as to experience. People behaving badly is an almost irredeemably boring topic these days. (Woe to the horror writer in an age when reality already gives us social and environmental nightmares of biblical proportions.) There is no new insight in simply observing that women and men are pitted against one another even as they attempt intimacy, or that people can be most callous when they should be most sensitive. Almost no one in You Know You Want This attempts to do the “right” thing. Instead, they give license to their basest impulses as a matter of course; kindness is not even a dream.
I agree that everyone sucks, but that’s hardly the last word. Most of us do not compel our irritating friends to murder their overbearing girlfriends. Most of us do not replace our ex-husband’s new girlfriend’s lube with superglue. I’d even venture to bet that most of us have never sincerely called someone a “whore,” at least not to their face (or their phone screen). Roupenian seems to favor a prompt of “what if?” And that certainly yields action. I wish she had sometimes asked why as well. -
Charlotte Shane https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_05/20616
It’s a tale as old as Facebook: An unknown author at the start of their career writes a story. It becomes a viral phenomenon, launching a thousand hot takes and think pieces about whether it rightfully or not reflects These Troubled Times. Amid the tsunami of debates, analyses, and debates over these analyses, a seven-figure two-book deal ensues, followed closely by a movie contract. We’ve seen the mad rush to capitalize on internet ephemera before, but what set Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” apart was how unlikely a candidate it was to grasp the nation’s fickle attention. The short story, about a date gone wrong, was lauded as the fictional encapsulation of the #MeToo movement, and critiqued for it as well. After the dust settled, the question that remained was whether the response to the story was more intriguing than the work itself.
Roupenian’s full-length debut, You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” And Other Stories, is meant to supply an answer. The 12 short stories in the collection explore the dangerously sadistic power dynamics between genders, rarely shying away from the uncomfortable and outright gruesome outcomes of desire. A 12-year-old girl has a menacing interaction with a drifter. A woman fantasizes over biting her womanizing coworker. A guy looking to hook up on Tinder gets more than he bargains for. It’s a work that will kindle Twitter rage threads that begin with “Let’s be clear” and satiate those that end with an ironic #notallmen. Therein lies its appeal and its chief problem. While the book can be engaging and deliciously creepy at times, it’s also schematic in its diagnosis of human nature in the way that so many social media debates tend to be.
Readers expecting “Cat Person” in different variations may be surprised to find this to be a gory book. The unflinching depictions of physical cruelty as a reflection of the psychological harm we are willing to carry out on others is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. It’s a stylistic choice that is announced with the opener, “Bad Boy,” a deeply unsettling story of a couple that sexually torments their heartbroken friend. There is punching, biting, kicking, cutting, piercing, chewing, hissing, crawling, slashing. Blood makes a recurring appearance. These stories may leave readers squirming, sometimes with tension, often with revulsion, and Roupenian is extremely skilled at escalating the stakes. “Love breeds monsters” appears etched on the body of one character, which seems to be the author’s main point: We can easily become monsters of our lust, if we feel entitled enough to act on it.
This commitment to portraying the human body as a potential site for gruesomeness is best served in the several horror stories peppered throughout. At times, the collection feels like two different books in their own power struggle (how Roupenian of them), with genres varying wildly from realism to fabulism to even paranormal goth. In “Scarred,” for example, a woman conjures a man to fulfill her desires, though it can only be done through the torture of his flesh. “The Mirror, The Bucket And The Old Thigh Bone” centers on a princess whose sexual infatuation with her reflection ends up deforming her. While at times these stories feel like intruders, they’re welcome ones. The condemnations of each of their protagonists make sense in a universe of fantastic creatures, black magic, and faraway kingdoms.
Advertisement
By the time he was thirty-five, the only way Ted could get hard and remain so for the duration of sexual intercourse was to pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it.
Roupenian’s work declares that there is no fun in reading between the lines, and this kind of obvious symbolism can be grating. Any straight woman who’s been on a date, let alone hundreds, will be able to predict each step of Ted’s psychological evolution from nerdy boy stuck in the friend zone to a commitment-phobe adult. Don’t worry, he’ll get the comeuppance he deserves. Any nuance brought to play in these morality tales is lost by the end, in favor of a resounding judgment.
Advertisement
https://aux.avclub.com/lust-breeds-monsters-in-the-full-length-debut-from-the-1831590117
I was really surprised by what I read — by how exciting, smart, perceptive, weird and dark this collection is ... You Know You Want This is probably best digested one or two stories at a time, but I kept getting lured into another and another just by Roupenian’s first sentences ... As varied as Roupenian’s stories are, they all clearly come from the same brain, one of those brains that feel out-of-this-world brilliant and also completely askew — like those of Karen Russell, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill ... I’ll say here that I’m not usually a fan of the dark, creepy or supernatural. My imagination holds onto those things for too long; I can’t shake them. But the power of these stories transcends any one genre or element ... What’s special about 'Cat Person,' and the rest of the stories in You Know You Want This, is the author’s expert control of language, character, story — her ability to write stories that feel told, and yet so unpretentious and accessible that we think they must be true.
Turns out there’s more where ['Cat Person'] came from, and it makes delicious reading. Roupenian’s You Know You Want This is a scintillating new debut collection, with a glorious revenge comedy at its center ... the book shows an impressive range ... 'Cat Person' was our tip-off to pay attention to what Roupenian did next. Now that it’s here, well, you know you want it. Read Full Review >>
Pedophilia, necrophilia, child abduction, child murder, mass murder—go down the menu of fears and outré fantasies; they’re all here. And for what? This is a dull, needy book. The desire to seem shocking—as opposed to a curiosity about thresholds physical and ethical—tends to produce provocation of a very plaintive sort ... With Roupenian, there is just the giddiness of her imagination, of what she can get away with ... characters remain their pathologies; the curtain falls on them before we can ever ask: Now what? There’s none of the simmer of 'Cat Person' or its attention to language in the rest of these stories. Roupenian will work a metaphor until it screams.Read Full Review >>
Roupenian's debut collection, You Know You Want This, demonstrates that her work is special. You Know You Want This is very good. For many readers, it may prove deceptive as well ... Roupenian's stories are extremely easy to read. She's worked out a way to write short stories that have no stopping points. They build steadily and discursively, and even the stories that jump years or decades seem to happen all in one breath ... [Roupenian] took risks on every level. There are genre switches, shock endings, even a fairy tale. There's plenty of superficially risky sexual content: submission, humiliation, knives. The collection's truest risk, though, is its directness ... This is blunt, fun, evocative writing.Read Full Review >>
In the twelve stories in Roupenian’s debut, You Know You Want This: 'Cat Person' and Other Stories, she establishes herself as a raucous and bloodthirsty storyteller who, even when she stumbles, never bores ... That’s not to say the stories are cookie-cutter, but that they each take a different angle on this particular model of human affairs. Actually, one of the book’s strengths is how diverse its styles and genres are, as it twists the formula of weak versus strong ... Although You Know You Want This may be timely in its occasional adjacency to #MeToo, its real canniness comes from apprehending the psychology not only of power, but of power-hunger as, itself, a form of weakness...
Recent MFA graduate Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This seems like [an MFA thesis] ... I felt absolutely enraged by [the book's] weaknesses. It does nobody any good, least of all the author, to pretend that the other stories in this collection are anywhere near as noteworthy or polished as 'Cat Person.' They are student work, and they trumpet their influences baldly ... Roupenian is great with those grisly, gory details; she writes them with wit and humor and glee ... Horror is great, ambiguity is fine, but they both need to be deployed in the service of something besides themselves.
The lurid jolts soon come to feel factitious and needy ... These rancid fantasies made my flesh crawl. And that was before I got to the story about a woman whose flesh crawls ... But where Gaitskill’s stories are transgressively adult, Roupenian’s are merely adolescent — often reading like entries from the journal of a 15-year-old boy who will go on to commit a high school massacre ... I had to muster all the strength I had to get through You Know You Want This, eventually alternating with Alan Bennett’s diaries so as not to lose faith in humanity. It isn’t all soulless and facile ... Roupenian is generally more engaging when she sticks to realism ... These stories feel rushed and dishonest at a time when we need fiction that scrutinises power rather than fetishises it. They are all spice and no flavour.Read Full Review >>
Obviously, sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum (that might be interesting); it’s often a way to discuss gender and power ... Kristen Roupenian’s debut short story collection, You Know You Want This, attempts to jump on this bandwagon and at the same time tip it over. She ends up driving it in a circle ... written in a smug tone that recalls a self-professed neurotic on a first date cheerfully outlining his adolescent traumas ... Reading ‘Cat Person’ alongside the other stories in You Know You Want This makes it difficult to see it the way many readers did initially, as a kind of feminist parable about the pressure to please ... in the collection, it’s often the hapless, infantilised, more or less well-intentioned men you feel sorry for ... The more speculative stories show most clearly how Roupenian uses sex and gruesomeness to deflect attention from her jazz-hand conclusions.
Kristen Roupenian's You Know You Want This: 'Cat Person' and Other Stories is a brutal, brilliant, biting, masterful debut short story collection that readers might think exists only as a forum for 'Cat Person' ... There are minor stories here, but none are weak ... Roupenian is completely in control of her vision from beginning to end. That's the bottom line with the dozen stories in You Know You Want This. Roupenian's confidence and willingness to follow through with the dark visions and sentimental longing in these 12 stories is enough to convince the reader that what follows will be equally surprising, dark, tender, and real.Read Full Review >>
The experience of reading the book itself takes on a meta aspect that is at once inescapable, interesting, and tedious. The stories...are weird, gross, and occasionally comic, the plots perverse and almost campy in their borrowings from horror. Although they vary significantly in setting, scenario, and even genre, they turn out to be surprisingly formulaic. A better title for this collection might have been 'Something Bad Is Going to Happen,' a realization you come to only a couple of stories in. Still, there’s a 1990s sensibility to some of the stories that I found perversely comforting, even though they are uniformly creepy ... I can well understand that for some reviewers, a Goosebumps-style aesthetic is not a selling point. But I found the stories mostly pleasurable. Roupenian is a funny writer, and comedy softens the ickiness of some of her premises, maybe to a fault ... I found You Know You Want This engaging but uneven.Read Full Review >>
The collection, which abounds in macabre scenarios and sadomasochistic themes, will cause many of those who saw themselves in 'Cat Person' to recoil ... The S&M element in some of the stories here...will remind many readers of the early work of Mary Gaitskill... But unlike Gaitskill, Roupenian seems to be reaching, flaunting her edge, eyeing her readers and hoping to see them gasp or wince. Even Gaitskill’s most unsettling stories aren’t performative in that way. They feel like the work of an intelligence wholly devoted to telling the truth, to the titanic task of doing justice to human beings as she sees them, without artifice or mystification ... Roupenian has a gift for locating the monstrous in the mundane; she doesn’t need to head out into the wilds to find it. Read Full Review >>
... a catalog of brutal truths and bad behavior that peels back the thin veneer of human sociability like so much cracked linoleum off an old bathroom floor ... While occasional swerves into a kind of nightmarish magical realism can feel less than fully realized, it’s the stories told in the viscerally intuitive vein of 'Cat Person' that linger; pithy, raw-nerved explorations of shame and desire and monumental self-loathing ... You Know You Want This is a spiky, ruthless little book, as confrontational and ugly-honest as its title.Read Full Review >>
Does [the book] live up to 'Cat Person'? Not quite. You Know You Want This is not a great book. It’s uneven, and it wants to shock more than it succeeds in shocking. But it’s never boring — and it reeks of potential ... When Roupenian leans into her ability to explore and explode modern archetypes like this, she’s a breathtakingly exhilarating force. But for most of You Know You Want This, Roupenian is not leaning into that ability. Instead, she seems to be experimenting, like a dutiful student ... Roupenian would have benefited from some time out of the spotlight to grow as a writer before she was catapulted into the center of the literary conversation. Still, when You Know You Want This is good, it is very, very good. Read Full Review >>
This is an enjoyable set of stories, often executed with flair. They’re fun. They’re just not what the fans of 'Cat Person' might be expecting ... This uneven collection certainly doesn’t live up to the hype. It’s not that zeitgeisty or cutting-edge. It’s apt to prove a momentary publishing sensation rather than an enduring classic ... Despite the absurdity of the undeserved hoopla, you still get the sense that she had a good time writing these tales, and I had a good time reading them. Read Full Review >>
Amid the noise, one certainty remained: 'Cat Person' is a good story ... Unfortunately, several of the stories here have the same intention as [the 'Cat Person' character] Robert’s final correspondence: they want to upset and disturb, at any price ... Roupenian is at her best when she discards shock tactics and levels her gaze at teenage sexuality ... This debut isn’t perfect, but I look forward to Roupenian’s next book and sincerely hope it’s spared the difficulty of being 'topical' and 'important'.
Here, Roupenian weaves a dozen compulsively readable stories of characters filled with perverse desires and motivations ... The stories are delightfully absorbing in their twisted cores ... There are moments, though, that tap into a kind of commentary that is clear and also feels new...Read Full Review >>
There’s little value in making a reader’s discomfort the sole point of a piece of fiction, yet most of the works that surround 'Cat Person' don’t seem to go much further. Particularly appealing to Roupenian is the shock value in foregrounding female antagonists ... How could such gruesome tales manage to be so tedious? ... Roupenian doesn’t have a responsibility to sort it all out for us; but in her binary explorations of abuse, she’s missed an opportunity to capture the gray areas. Read Full Review >>
... vivid, keenly observational and often highly uncomfortable tales ... Roupenian is skilled at forcing her readers to confront some painful truths, but her questions about life and society form a foundation for the wild situations in which her characters find themselves ... I’ll be the first to admit that not every story connected with me ... That said, I applaud her willingness to explore various genres, and cannot wait to see how she grows as a writer, as she is clearly off to a tremendous start. Read Full Review >>
At its best, what You Know You Want This contains are less stories of people than diagrams of power differentials at work in the mundane world around us, sketches delineating how desire unchecked can guide us into dark places. The stories that land... are realist but unapologetically flashy, aiming right for the throat. Too flashy, even. The dazzle makes them feel true, like a revelation from our own bone-deep knowledge of the world...Read Full Review >>
Roupenian has an ear for dialogue and a knack for satire, and she often tips her characters into dark fantasy worlds and even-stranger realities to get at their ultimate truths ... Curious readers will be rewarded. Read Full Review >>
Although she often seems to be aiming for Bad Behavior-era Mary Gaitskill, Roupenian at her most gross-out reminded me more of the grisly provocations of Chuck Palahniuk. Cruelty and macabre can be thrilling in moderation, but Roupenian often lays them on so thick that they risk flattening her characters into one-dimensional cartoons. Roupenian, though, does has a gift for propulsion and pacing: Even in the times when this book disgusted or infuriated me, I couldn’t put it down. Read Full Review >>
'Bad Boy' — if readers survive its horror — is a fantastic story. No matter how despicable the scenario, Roupenian leaves questions unanswered and tempts the reader onward, a choice that few will be able to turn down ... While the writing of [some] stories maintains their quality, the structure falls flat. The endings jump away from the central plot they maintained for their first half, almost as though Roupenian ran out of ideas and scribbled in some gasp-worthy ending so that the middle stories matched the rest of the collection ... But between 'Cat Person' and the eight other sensations in You Know You Want This, the collection is easily forgivable for these lapses ... You Know You Want This navigates the desire to hurt and be hurt, the realm of lust, infatuation, harassment and, yes, the politics of being a mother of a pre-teen. And it is remarkable. Read Full Review >>
Roupenian’s debut story collection, You Know You Want This, mines the same territory as 'Cat Person' — relationships are corrosive — but the nuanced insight of her breakout effort is largely absent, replaced by a reliance on violence to hammer home easy points ... These stories feel unpolished, almost rushed, and their dependence on brutality again and again evokes clickbait more than literature. Read Full Review >>
Readers looking to You Know You Want This for further insights into 'sex, dating, and modern life' (as it says on the tin), however, may be disappointed to find that the majority of the stories involve a supernatural or macabre twist. When Roupenian stretches plausibility to provoke, as in the grisly denouement of the opening story, she loses her hold on our attention ... it is in rendering reality with fine brushstrokes, as in her depiction of the wavering line between attraction and repulsion in 'Cat Person,' that Roupenian is at her best ... some of the collection — the bulk of which was written before Roupenian stepped into the spotlight — may have benefited from more time to incubate ... when Roupenian remains rooted in realism, she gives pause by exposing the sinister side of sexuality, and one looks forward to seeing what she might accomplish with the novel form. Read Full Review >>
You Know You Want This is full of surprises ... The collection is bold, bizarre and defiant, like a lot of its central characters ... equal parts Brothers Grimm and The Human Centipede ... If all of this sounds completely insane, it is – but wonderfully, humorously so ... If you’re looking for more 'Cat Person'-esque commentary on relationships, You Know You Want This has its moments ... stylistic echoes of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends ... Like Netflix’s You, it does a good job of making you secretly root for an obsessive, borderline dangerous loser of a guy you’d never want to admit you were rooting for ... vividly imagined ... a highly accomplished collection. It does also feel like there’s something in there for everyone – but it will inevitably end up being something you never knew you actually wanted.Read Full Review >>
You Know You Want This at once enchants and horrifies. Ms Roupenian’s occasional supernatural touches can be distracting, but at its best her writing recalls the gloomy feminist fairy-tales of Angela Carter. This collection cements her reputation as one of the most startling new voices in fiction. Read Full Review >>
I absorbed the stories, marveling largely at their readability. I liked the book; I recommended the book to friends. Then, I sat down and read the book again, unable to shake the feeling that its readability—its few demands on me as a reader—was the only thing to recommend the collection of stories ... There are elements of the grotesque and the fantastical... but it’s an empty fantasy that, at times, lacks the substance to make the stories stick ... Perhaps because of the response [to 'Cat Person'], You Know You Want This, is a short story collection with tremendous expectations that doesn’t quite live up to its hype ... The trouble [with the book's style] is: shock is a limited resource and its effectiveness dwindles with each story.Read Full Review >>
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.