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gglazer's review against another edition
5.0
Elizabeth Crane is just hitting my sweet spot right now -- I haven't allowed myself much fiction since I started school and am trying to read about reference services before I fall asleep, but I cracked on the long bus ride to and from NYC.
When the Messenger is Hot felt like a continuation of All This Heavenly Glory to me, although Crane wrote Messenger first and I'm sure it Glory felt that way to people who read them in the right order. Both books have the same breathlessness, the same introspective and semi-self-obsessed themes, the same connected stories written by narrators that it's hard not to assume are Crane herself, the same play with stream-of-consciousness language and punctuation. I love it.
An example from "Proposal," a story about getting rid of Valentine's Day:
So that is my proposal, that we take this day and call up our people and we send them cards that are made out of whatever, and we tell them things, we can just say, Hey, hey, you, if we can't think of anything else, or if we are not the type of people to tell our friends we love them, you know, openly. Or we can even go ahead and tell them cheesy things if we are the type of people who like cheesy things as long as we make up the cheesy things ourselves, we can tell them why we're glad they're alive and tell them to call us tomorrow and say they're okay. Because otherwise my best hope is that years from now, when these people who have lost people meet new people, when they get new valentines and new champagne and roses and proposals and Vegas weddings, that this day will at best rise to the level of bittersweet. (145-6)
When the Messenger is Hot felt like a continuation of All This Heavenly Glory to me, although Crane wrote Messenger first and I'm sure it Glory felt that way to people who read them in the right order. Both books have the same breathlessness, the same introspective and semi-self-obsessed themes, the same connected stories written by narrators that it's hard not to assume are Crane herself, the same play with stream-of-consciousness language and punctuation. I love it.
An example from "Proposal," a story about getting rid of Valentine's Day:
So that is my proposal, that we take this day and call up our people and we send them cards that are made out of whatever, and we tell them things, we can just say, Hey, hey, you, if we can't think of anything else, or if we are not the type of people to tell our friends we love them, you know, openly. Or we can even go ahead and tell them cheesy things if we are the type of people who like cheesy things as long as we make up the cheesy things ourselves, we can tell them why we're glad they're alive and tell them to call us tomorrow and say they're okay. Because otherwise my best hope is that years from now, when these people who have lost people meet new people, when they get new valentines and new champagne and roses and proposals and Vegas weddings, that this day will at best rise to the level of bittersweet. (145-6)
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