Likes

July 1, 2020
A collection of stories that find politics gone crazy, girls and women navigating their ways through social media minefields, and identity refracted through celebrity culture. The title story generated considerable attention when it appeared in the New Yorker in 2017. On one level it's about a father's attempts to decipher the life of his 12-year-old daughter through her Instagram posts, some of which appear to be suggestive, or maybe that's just to him. Here's one: "New post: a pair of lips, shining wetly." Another: "New Instagram post: a peeled-off pair of ballet tights, splayed on the white tiles of a bathroom floor." Just what is it she's trying to communicate, and with whom? When he tries to talk with his daughter, she's often silent or, perhaps worse, complains that she has no friends. Beyond the father-daughter relationship, the story, set against a backdrop of a dysfunctional culture whose presidential election defies understanding, captures a more general malaise. So many of the stories here are about trying to understand, failing to connect, and interpreting the signs from a relentless barrage of media. The stories evoke myth ("The Erlking"), fairy tales ("Young Wife's Tale"), and science fiction ("The Burglar"), with dreamlike reveries that find protagonists not quite clear on what they're experiencing, let alone what it means. Throughout, Bynum combines a firm command of tone (often warm, even when dark) with precise detail. In "Many a Little Makes," the longest story and the collection's centerpiece, a woman named Mari gets a long text from an old friend and finds it reviving all sorts of memories of girls on the cusp of adolescence, how a few years found them changing so dramatically in different ways, how boys and parents complicated the relationship. Bynum's characters struggle to determine who they are, how they are, and how they were, in a distant time before smartphones and cyber-media. As clean prose dissects messy lives, these stories combine an empathetic heart with acute understanding.

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Starred review from July 6, 2020
Bynum’s sparkling, transcendent latest (after Ms. Hempel Chronicles) follows the big decisions and minutiae that make up the messy lives of her characters. Each story is delicate and dazzling in its own way—this is the rare collection where each entry is as good as the one that came before it. The title story follows a father’s desperate attempts to understand his young daughter through the lens of her pink-hued Instagram feed. In “The Bears,” a writer attends a rural residency while recovering from the trauma of a miscarriage; there, she doesn’t write, and on her long walks becomes obsessed with a gorgeous nearby house and its mysterious occupant. “Julia and Sunny” chronicles the dissolution of a once-solid marriage from the biased perspective of the couple’s closest friends, another married couple. And in the sublime “Many a Little Makes,” three school friends explore their differences in race, body type, and varying degrees of sexual experimentation. The stories hum with thrilling detail and are touched here and there by small hints of magic, such as a young girl imagining a stranger at a party will give her a gift (“A surprise that is small and very delicate, like a music box, but when you open it, it goes down and down, like a rabbit hole, and inside there is everything”). With the exuberance of the best Elizabeth McCracken stories and the insights of Tessa Hadley, these tales are at once gorgeously rendered and empathetic. This has the feel of an instant classic. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.

August 1, 2020
Bynum's (Ms. Hempel Chronicles, 2008) prowess here lies in her ingenious ability to elevate seemingly minor moments into the pivotal crux of a narrative. Take, for example, in Julia and Sunny, perhaps the most affecting of Bynum's nine stories, a small square of silky, pale blue material that is mistakenly left behind by one child, found by another, then neglected by the adults who should have been more responsible. Into that single blue square, Bynum deftly, remarkably, weaves the dissolution of a marriage, a family, and an intensely long friendship between two couples. In other standouts, an unexpected message addressed to a long-unused nickname reveals the complicated history of three childhood friends in Many a Little Makes; in the titular Likes, a father considers that his tween daughter's Instagram account is more revealing than his actual child; in The Burglar, a scheduled pest extermination appointment becomes the converging point for an intruder, his victims, and a fictional criminal a screenwriter is loath to create. Although the collection proves uneven, Bynum's more dazzling tales surpass the less memorable for ultimately rewarding results(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 30, 2020

The stories in Bynum's new collection are linked not by recurring characters or settings but by a certain sensibility. Each is an acutely realistic and nuanced depiction of a relationship--whether between friends, spouses, parent and child--often with an additional element of fairy tale or fantasy that keeps the reader slightly off-kilter. In "The Erlking," the opening story, a mother and daughter experience an Elves Faire at a Waldorf School in their own parallel realities, the mother in an echo chamber of her own parental insecurities and anxieties, the daughter glimpsing the vaguely menacing magic behind the cutesy facade. In "The Burglar," aspects of a woman's encounter with a petty thief mirror a script that her husband is writing for a supernatural TV crime show. In "The Bears," a woman convalescing at a writer's retreat after a miscarriage has a Goldilocks-like experience in a beautiful house with which she becomes obsessed on her solitary walks. The longest story, "Many a Little Makes," is an exceedingly tender and raw depiction of an adolescent friendship among three girls, viewed from a distance. VERDICT A striking and memorable collection of surprising stories and shifting identities. --Lauren Gilbert, Center for Jewish History, New York NY

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