The Melancholy of Anatomy

February 18, 2002
In her oddly infantile, solemnly scatological first collection of stories treating the body's four "humors," online fiction diva Jackson (The Patchwork Girl) sends up Robert Burton's sprawling 17th-century medical treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
In her take, the humors—Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic and Sanguine—function as the intriguing divisions of this dark, slender work. Around each, she attempts to construct, if not a story, then musings on a bodily necessity, with each part further broken down into its most visceral elements: Choleric into chapters called "Egg," "Sperm," "Foetus"; Melancholic into "Cancer," "Nerve," "Dildo" and so forth. Wisely, Jackson chooses to open with the one coherently plotted story: "Egg" concerns a 36-year-old woman in San Francisco working in a grocery store and living with her ex-lover, Cass; the narrator removes an egg from her tear duct, nurtures it until it grows as big as a boulder, then allows the care of its pink insatiable perfection to lift from her the burden of desire and decision. In other stories, similarly feckless narrators focus with morbid obsession on trapping bodily fluids and herding sperm; growing cancer like a species of exotic, intractable tree; gathering nerve fibers and fashioning them into inflammable hats for ladies. Though Jackson endeavors to keep the tone high by giving her prose a sarcastic scientific veneer ("Sperm are ancient creatures, single-minded as coelacanths"), her references do not go deep enough, and her humor here is arch and superficial. Cleverly imagined but laboriously executed, these stories are squeezed too tightly through the wringer of their premise. Author appearances in New York. (Apr.)Forecast:Anointed as a
Voice Writer on the Verge and heralded as a top online talent (like Eisen—see below), Jackson has already made a reputation for herself. Whether she can cross over successfully remains to be seen, but the low paperback price will help.

April 1, 2002
In these 13 well-wrought, mind-bending stories, grouped by the four medieval physiological humors, people interact with bodily parts, products, and processes, often at their peril. An egg expands from the size of a dot to enfold, then expel, the woman on whom it grew, while sperm increase to buffalo heft, serving as pets, performers, and food (with a favorite recipe included), yet with a dangerous edge to their playfulness. A fetus devoted to service becomes the town pastor, and phlegm is so highly prized in social and sexual situations that low-phlegm producers can buy the prepared kind. The city of London has menstrual cycles, during which female swabbers go deep into its blood pipes to insert a giant tampon, and sleep is a crumblike substance that falls like rain, from which each person can form one substitute to act in his or her stead. Jackson, author of the novel " The Patchwork Girl" (1995), probes at the relationship between the emotional and the physical in these fantastic, sometimes stomach-turning stories, for a particular audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)