Susan Steinberg’s collection of short stories, Spectacle, addresses the hopeful anticipation and inevitable disappointing reality in life.
The lyrical stories of Spectacle are about women and how they relate to their families, their lovers and to themselves. The stories are linked to each other with the repeated images of Baltimore, a certain nightclub, a plane crash, a father, a mother and a brother. Each story is narrated by a different woman, but the voices of the narration run together, so that upon looking back at the book, it feels like a collective history of womanhood.
Womanhood has many definitions in Spectacle, and identity is composed of the many performances that a single person acts out. One woman is a different person to herself, to her father, to her brother, to her boyfriend and even to the person reading her story. The woman has a different identity for each separate way that each person perceives her. Spectacle suggests that there is not just one constant self, but actually a great deal more.
There are many spectacles in Spectacle: The spectacle of being a woman, the spectacle that each performance of a new identity creates, the spectacles of men that the narrators agonize over and the spectacle of the book itself, the spectacle that Steinberg creates for her readers. The stories are beautiful and absorbing, and sometimes they are funny.
Steinberg’s experimental style is prominent, a style that constantly changes throughout her book. The words stack on top of each other, not really in paragraphs, but in pointed statements, like lines from a joke.
The unrealities that Steinberg creates — the person and the better person that she was supposed to be, what the lover would have done had he been there, the collection of many identities and many lives for a single woman — are painfully familiar, tragic and true.
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