It’s Symbolism, Kids
One of the character has a little story that for some reasons is termed “The Hedgehog Tale.” Now, of course, anyone with the slightest sense will realize that it is not really about hedgehogs, but calling it the alligator tale is probably too much of a spoiler. It’s supposed to be symbolic and if it helps at all to clarify be aware that appears in a story where the protagonist is a Jewish man:
“The hedgehog goes for a walk, because he is feeling sad—it’s based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house that has a sign on it that says, WELCOME, HEDGEHOG: THIS COULD BE YOUR NEW HOME , and because he’s been feeling sad, the thought of a new home appeals. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators— Well, I’ll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that.”
Bikers from Anywhere but Hell
In one of the stories, a group of bikers crash a wedding and proceed to go about doing what bikers do at such times: shooting a gun into the air in three quick rounds. They are soon made to realize, however, they have made a mistake and have shown up at the wrong wedding at which they proceed to apologize and politely make their exit. But here’s the weird part: the following imagery inclusive in the speech which the head biker gives that is filled with rationalizations for their violent behavior occurs not after, but before they even realize they’re in the wrong place:
“The biker with the gun and the puppy ears began to shout. I have a firearms license and those were blanks and this is self-defense because our group here has an easement that extends just this far into this driveway. Also? We were abused as children and as adults and moreover we have been eating a hell of a lot of Twinkies.’”
That last part about the Twinkies is not as bizarre at it seems. It is a reference to Dan White’s defense strategy—successful, believe it or not—that eating too many Twinkies made him murder Harvey Milk in cold blood.
Mid-Life Crises According to Ira
Ira is going through the crisis of divorce. It’s a lot to handle and he is not handling it especially well; six months and he still hasn’t managed to work his wedding ring off his finger. Still, it has managed lend him a new and improved perspective on certain aspects of modern-day life; a perspective filled with perfectly appropriate imagery:
“Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he’d watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.”
It's Not Just There
The first-person female narrator of the “The Juniper Tree” labors under the delusion that she lives in some sort of unique existence. The imagery she uses describe her specific situation seems more than adequate for describing just about any place in America where women past a non-specific age congregate:
“Every woman I knew here drank—daily. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another. I was the only one of my friends—all of us academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base (or, so we imagined it)—who hadn’t had something terrible happen to her yet.”
