If you like Seinfeld, you’ll
love Scenes because it’s
a book about nothing.

Unlike Seinfeld, this book does
considerably more than play at sex with double entendres and teasers. It goes
at it full bore. Page after page after page. But the sexual antics of the
bi-coastal urbanites who populate the book wind up to be as dull as everything
else about them. Seinfeld features some appealing characters, but this is not
the case in Scenes. Everyone in the
book seems to be a victim of arrested development — sexual and otherwise.

Making
Scenes is a good title
because at least on one level it describes the book to a tee. It is really a
collection of scenes without a play to give them context. Maybe that is the
author’s statement about life in the new millennium.

Even though the characters leave a lot to
be desired and the full story is missing, I congratulate Ms. Eisen for
producing this book. Her talent is evident in the way she handles dialogue and
makes even her transitionless paragraphs somehow hang together. I wouldn’t
go so far to say that there is a definable plot in the text, but I think
there is some kind of underlying structure that I can identify as a
coming-of-age story. Her main character has no name (or at least I can’t
recall one), yet Eisen manages to keep her clearly in focus throughout the
book.

Making
Scenes is not a book for
everyone, but then neither is Moby Dick.
Both can be boring for long stretches at a time, but it is fair to say that
each in its own way also illuminates dark corners in human life. Granted, the
light is rather dim in Making Scenes,
but it is there nonetheless.

I hope Eisen writes another book and
titles it "Baggage." That way, her admirers will be able to find out
the part of the story she omits in Making
Scenes.

© 2002 Liz Bass

   
    Liz Bass is a retired teacher and principal who lives in
Northern California.

Categories: Fiction, Sexuality