Book Review : Marston Hefner - High School Romance (2022)
Hard truth: almost anyone can write a decent short story. It takes a lot less discipline, knowledge and skill than writing a novel or even a screenplay. That’s why there is (allegedly) more short story collections in circulation than humans on this planet. What’s more difficult than writing a decent short story is writing a short story (or short story collection) that people actually want to read. In order to pull it off, you need a theme. A grand existential question that readers will relate to from one story to another.
A question like: what are Hugh Hefner’s son views on love and desire? I got your interest right away, didn't I? That’s exactly how Marston Hefner’s upcoming collection High School Romance roped me in to reveal a unique and tantalizing talent.
High School Romance is a whisper of a book. Eighteen stories scattered over seventy-nine pages, which are best consumed if given the chance to exist in your mind separately. Even for five minutes or so. In the opener The Moon is a Tapestry. A Nightmare a man recalls in eccentric grammar being cuckolded by Elon Musk on the moon. Although it's funny and bonkers, it's a solid story about feelings of inadequacy and the symbology of hustle culture. Elon Musk is not a human in this story. He's more of a penis-shaped nightmare.
The invisible forces that shape our lives
I thought The Moon is a Tapestry. A Nightmare brilliantly set the tone for what was to come: a series of intimate, confessional-like portraits of characters struggling with desire. Sometimes deviant. Sometimes very simple and straightforward. In the title story, the narrator is 27 years old and fostering a relationship to his friend’s 17 years old daughter. It’s a tricky one because it's one of the most explicitly deviant stories in High School Romance, but it's also one where the crucial part is not on the page.
Liz and the narrator are attracted to each other because it is forbidden and since it's forbidden, everybody dances around the question and send each other underhanded messages in conversation. Taboo shapes their relationship. It’s clever and even oddly sexy. A story like Fast Freddy is about a completely other form of desire: the psychosexual longing to be special and the realization that you probably won’t ever be. It is frantic and tragic at once since it is literally about a child's heartbreak.
Another haunting short in Marston Hefner’s collection is Being Alone, where the narrator admits beating off to Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. While it is undoubtedly provocative, it dares looking an ugly issue that plagues us all to a certain degree: the fleeting and often conflictual natures of purpose and fulfillment. It's not an easy character to show compassion to, but not because he’s outwardly alienating. It’s because he has what everyone wants and it makes him miserable.
Even if the stories of High School Romance are incredibly short, it's hart not to love the sophistication of Marston Hefner's ideas and storytelling skills. Although his snippets barely have enough breathing room to exist, they never feel forceful or didactic. Other once I really liked were: Let Us Dance A Bit Longer, Feel Something Big and salarymen4. There are maybe one or two stories I would qualify of "a miss" in the collection, but they were reprints. Given the length of the collection, it's understandable.
There’s something about Marsten
I really liked High School Romance, but it's hard to make up my mind about Marsten Hefner given the fleeting nature of the collection. I was sometimes reminded of the graceful cleverness of Pete Dexter. I also had glimpses of Jeffrey Eugenides' neurotic nostalgia. He's very good at creating what I call "swelling moments". Snapshots of daily life that grow in importance as the recede into memory and become a part of you. You might find this artsy fartsy, but it’s the most relatable thing, really.
High School Romance was frustratingly short at times (and redeemingly short at others), but I thought it was at its best when it explored transgressive desires. By that, I mean desires that are still (or that have become) taboo in 2022. That’s why stories like Fast Freddy and SATS feel so unsettling and real. They’re exploring feelings and desires we still don’t allow ourselves to put in words. Hefner does, but in such a roundabout way that it arouses these feelings in you while you’re reading it.
*
If good fiction is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable… well, High School Romance achieved both in its own way? If that makes sense? It's really short, but it feels mature and controlled. It’s uncomfortable, but it feels earnest and kind. It’s almost like reading journal entries from unrelated imaginary people that struggle with similar things. High School Romance is solid. Short story collections are a dime a dozen on the internet, but I've never quite read one like this.
