Inventing Victor

By Jennifer Bannan

Jennifer Bannan, the young author of Inventing Victor, explores with fresh wit the battlefield of truth and lies. Sometimes as hazy as a summer day in Pittsburgh, other times bustling with the celebrity of a Miami vomitorium on opening night, the stories deftly depict the lure of irresponsibility. The characters stoke the flames of artifice in trying to close in on their desires: teenaged Dacia lets her need for popularity lead her to self-destruction, and Orthodox Leah is too busy wanting a child to see that she's already a terrible mother. Middle-aged Mark is vicious to his wife in protecting a romantic past he's no longer sure he lived. When these characters are finally face-to-face with reality, they may succumb to it, but not without a regretful glance over the shoulder. A brave look at American lives in lurid moments of ambition and self-trickery, Inventing Victor provides just a flicker of hope: that the guiltiest among us can see the truth laid out, if only in the instant that dreams go up in smoke.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887483976
• ISBN13: 9780887483974
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant!

Once I got a few pages into it, i couldn't put it down. Jennifer Bannan is a brilliant and sharp upcoming writer.

Keith Banner calls these stories "brutal honesty"

Keith Banner, just reviewed in the New York Times for his "Smallest People Alive," also from Carnegie Mellon University Press, says on the Inventing Victor back cover: "Jennifer Bannan's Inventing Victor is a sharply written collection of funny, unnerving short stories that never settle for easy answers. Bannan's characters, self-reflective losers negotiating their ways through life with the low-volume enthusiasm of pro-bowlers, narrate each story in deceptively simple voices. But the stories themselves are never simple or deceptive. Bannan is after a kind of truth most literary writers try to avoid: brutal honesty in the face of all the bad things human beings do to each other. The title story alone is worth the price of admission. Fast-paced yet creepily intense, hilarious and very sad, it tells the story of a 15-year-old girl who can't stop lying, even while she knows this lying is slowly destroying her life. As you read this story, you start questioning all the lies you've ever told in order to impress people, all the ways in which dishonesty is sometimes all you have to keep yourself interesting, and maybe even aware of who you are."

Funny, well written, intelligent

"Inventing Victor" is funny and disturbing, and sometimes even both. The often weird characters never lose the narrator's empathy. Life consists of decisions neither right nor wrong, since one can always only know the consequence of the decision made. That's what the stories are about. There is no "wrong", no condemnation. Life goes on and maybe one learns from the past. Maybe not. But hey- life is still a worthwhile experience.This positive attitude towards life's challenges made the book an extremely uplifting read despite the characters' often sad stories. Sometimes you laugh at them and sometimes with them. And that is extremely refreshing and enjoyable.

Zeroing in on everyday thrills and frustrations

From the San Francisco Chronicle Review, by Jules Siegel Jennifer Bannan's short-story collection, "Inventing Victor," is mercilessly funny domestic comedy so biting that it is sometimes difficult to laugh along with her. In the title story, an adolescent Cuban American girl invents an imaginary lover. In writing about this common teenage manipulation, she displays an honesty as sensitive as it is intense. "My parents were strict, overbearing, old-fashioned Cubans who wouldn't let me date without a chaperone," confesses Dacia, the girl who invents the lover to impress her popular and attractive friend, Minita. "I chose not to date, rather than risk that embarrassment," she confides bravely, and then hits you with a sucker punch: "It wasn't like there was a demand for me in the junior- high dating world. I was ugly." "B and B" begins with simple sentences that sum up the argument of her story and -- this is really not too grandiose a judgment -- one of her generation's central dilemmas: "Because Catherine and John were liberals living in Pittsburgh, a segregated town with known race problems, they were committed to living in one of the few racially mixed neighborhoods. Their pride in this decision became a subtext of their lives." Unfortunately, their black neighbors do not respond very well to their humble attempts at integration. "I'm not really supposed to talk to white people," a school-age girl tells John, who has been trying to build rapport with her. Catherine suffers a "nagging sensation that she was missing something deep and meaningful by knowing only people like herself." When she and John vacation in Virginia Beach, it seems as if her fantasies are going to be fulfilled. An upper-middle-class black couple is staying at the bed and breakfast, too. In this subtle yet complex story, racial differences are trumped by social similarities, as the two couples find that similarities divide them from each other more than differences. "Some white people, they want to take the diversity thing a little too far, " Simone tells Catherine. "They want representatives of the hood; they don't want middle class blacks to be their black friends." "B and B" is, by far, the star of this ruthlessly revealing collection. The other stories are accomplished enough, but at times the author tends to reach too far in burlesquing the idiocies of the publicity business and other middle- class foibles. Nonetheless, a promotion campaign based on how urine smells after one eats asparagus might provoke a wry chuckle or two among readers who've worked on the inside of any agency or corporate public-relations department. It's easy to forgive Bannan's excesses because she writes so clearly and eloquently about the daily frustrations and thrills of ordinary life that too many writers ignore in their quest for existential meaning. This is not someone who is interested in the Big Picture except by inference. Yet when she is at the top of her form, her stories take on very sig

quick interesting read

lots of "what's going to happen now?". first 2 stories ok, but from "inventing victor" on the stories are quick reads about real people and with situtions that makes one smile. the characters will seem "like someone i know". some extemely good writing. if you like contempory short stories, read this one.