The Sparkling-Eyed Boy

April 26, 2004
While the words "what if" may be the most potent daydream triggers known to humanity, writers usually explore the road-not-taken in the format of fiction. Benson's Bakeless Prize–winning work of "creative nonfiction" comprises some 32 entries relating to the "sparkling-eyed boy" of her teen years, her first big love. What if she'd kept coming back to Upper Michigan to see him every summer? What if they'd become a real couple? What if they'd had sex? What if they'd married? So this is a memoir, then, of what did not happen. As such, it isn't so much about this boy, but about Benson's feelings and her pleasure in writing about them. At times, it's as if Benson is reading over her own shoulder, commenting on her own musings. She writes that she considered suicide once, but then rebukes herself: "This is bad ethics: I shouldn't let the people who will worry about me know this." After describing the boy's form as "thrown into relief" she adds, "what a beautiful phrase, 'thrown into relief.' " She's fond of the paradoxical pronouncement: "It is our own goodness that gives us the power to be terrible." Buried among these uninteresting musings are occasional moments of insight. A friend tells her, "You're pining for something
; you're not really pining for him
." Benson admits she's right, that she's pining because "it feels good to feel bad sometimes. So much better than feeling nothing." Readers may want a little more from a book, however.

June 15, 2004
In this collection of essays, Benson revisits her youth, specifically, the events that took place on Michigan's Upper Peninsula where she summered with her family. She contrasts the constancy and the rootedness of those visits with her lack of a sense of belonging to a particular place as a grownup. To try to understand this difference, Benson ruminates on the boy she met there, her first love, and uses their relationship to understand who she has become later in life. The essays move between real and imagined or reimagined events, in both the present and the past. Benson's training as a poet is evident throughout; her words often resonate, managing to convey her personality through an effective use of imagery. Ultimately, however, the premise that one can understand oneself by examining a first relationship does seem a bit self-indulgent. Recommended for academic libraries with creative writing programs. [This debut was awarded the 2004 Bakeless Prize for Creative Nonfiction.-Ed.]-Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2004
In this rather self-absorbed, obsessive reworking of her first experience with love, Benson recounts her childhood summers spent on the Upper Peninsula (UP) in Michigan, where she met the sparkling-eyed boy, who lived there year-round. Although she never tells us his name, she precisely details his physical appearance, their halting conversations, and their every encounter from the first moment they met diving off a country dock. She tells of the fraught relationship between UPers and summer residents, who often vied over who had a deeper sense of place. More often, she dithers over the fact that he has married, as though she expected him always to be there, waiting for her. Her memoir is filled with an aching yearning and tinged with an eroticism that seem out of all proportion to the innocent relationship they shared as adolescents. Yet her unseemly obsession also works as a remarkably candid disclosure of what it feels like to be young and in love for the first time. Winner of a prize for creative nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, this is a provocative, intense read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)