Wednesday, July 6, 2022 — 3
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
‘Objects of Desire’ cultivates intimacy and demands it from you
EMILIA FERRANTE
Senior Arts Editor
Clare Sestanovich’s “Objects of
Desire” feels like the end of a gray,
overcast day when you realize you
haven’t spoken to anyone since you
woke up. Maybe you say a word out
loud, just to remind yourself that you
can talk, and your voice is scratchy
with disuse. In the haze of solitude,
everything starts to look like a
metaphor: the coffee machine, the
clouds, the brown water stain on the
ceiling. Life seems beautiful — not
in the sunny, ecstatic way but in the
melancholy, pensive way.
Sestanovich’s collection of short
stories captures this elusive feeling
exquisitely. Her stories are filled
with yearning and meaning and
mundanity that feels meaningful.
She
has
a
talent
for
making
anything significant: Skittles, eggs,
Tupperware, semen, ice skates, a tile
floor. In the story “Old Hope,” the
narrator has inherited
glow-in-the-dark
celestial
stickers
on
her rented bedroom’s
ceiling, which combines
the childlike nostalgia
and bitter realism of
adulthood,
a
theme
common
throughout
“Objects
of
Desire.”
The
narrator
writes,
“Sometimes
in
the
morning there was a star
or an orb or a planet’s ring
on the pillow beside me.”
It seems like the perfect
metaphor, imbued with
a meaning so potent
it can’t be ignored. I
don’t
know
exactly
what it’s a metaphor
for — and Sestanovich,
in a move consistent
throughout the stories,
doesn’t elaborate on the
meanings
behind
the
suddenly
significant
mundanities
she
describes. Even further,
she resists the urge to
romanticize; she follows
the line about stars with
“I had to remind myself
not to make everything
into a metaphor.” It feels
almost like the reader
is being chastised as
the narrator chastises
herself for reading too
far into things. But we
are eventually validated
in our feeling that there’s
got to be a metaphor
in
there
somewhere
because
Sestanovich ends the story with the
same image: “I sat up. A star did not
fall from the ceiling.”
“Objects of Desire” is heavy with
metaphors like this one. From a less
skilled writer, this would become
exhausting; short stories can get
bogged down in their attempt to
convey too much in too little space.
Like a poem, a short story doesn’t
have the freedom of a novel to get its
meaning across — it can’t try to do
everything a longer narrative does.
This means that every word in a short
story is that much more important to
the meaning of the story as a whole,
and this is where metaphor can get
tiring. Instead, Sestanovich’s stories
are invigorating, no one sentence
doing too much of the heavy lifting.
She carefully cultivates a mood and
a character in each of her stories and
guides the reader from beginning to
end so seamlessly you’ll forget you’re
reading at all.
Short stories generally have to
choose one aspect of narrative;
while some short stories rely on plot
or setting, the stories of “Objects
of
Desire”
rely
on
character.
Sestanovich’s protagonists — all
different, all women — share a certain
kind of melancholy, a yearning, a
sense of being unfulfilled. They are
all, to differing degrees, trying to
figure out what the world around
them wants: In the short story that
shares its name with the collection,
Leonora finds that “The more
passionate her displays of anger, the
more gratified her friends are.” In
this way, Sestanovich explores the
way women are expected to behave
and how those expectations match up
with reality. She gives us an intimate
view of the narrators, a peek behind
the curtain of their external facades
and into their inner thoughts in a way
that makes them seem unabashedly
real. In “Annunciation,” for example,
Iris “gives herself assignments” to
appear as though she doesn’t care,
like “eat peanut butter straight
from the jar, steal ChapStick from
CVS.”
In
curating
carelessness,
she realizes that “In general, not
caring requires studiousness.” This
studied, methodical quirkiness reads
as both funny and sad — we can all
see ourselves in Iris trying to be
something she is not.
Intimacy is something this book
both cultivates with its reader and
explores in its stories. Even in its most
distant narrators, “Objects of Desire”
makes us care intensely about them
for the short period of time they exist
on the pages. Some short stories leave
you itching to know more about their
protagonist or grateful that you’re
not reading a novel because the
protagonist is so awful. Sestanovich’s
are like the Goldilocks of short story
characters: They seep into the pages
deeply when you read, full of life and
imbued with undeniable existence,
and then their vignette is up, and they
sink back down. These stories feel
complete, even as our experiences
with characters end unfulfilled. The
open-endedness creates an intimacy
with the reader — you have been
trusted with this story, just a little
snippet of life, and you can do what
you will with it. Often, that means
sitting with the last page of the story
for a while, letting it ooze into your
pores. Sometimes, it means flipping
immediately to the next story,
entranced by Sestanovich’s gentle yet
driving prose and wanting to meet
her next character.
“Objects of Desire” stays true to
its name, examining both the way
women move through society, and
the things they yearn for and often
don’t receive. Sestanovich’s prose is
dexterous and haunting, and her style
is a comforting sameness in stories
that cover different people, places
and events. Each story stands on its
own while also silently speaking to
each other between the covers — it’s
up to you, the reader, to figure out
what exactly they’re saying.
Senior Arts Editor Emilia Ferrante
can be reached at emiliajf@umich.edu.
Cover art for “Objects of Desire” owned by Penguin Random House