Cinderella She Was Not

by Bob Thurber

Winner of the 2006 Meridian Editor's Fiction Prize.
A terse, edgy, darkly humorous novelette about love and marriage and infidelity from the audacious author of Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel.
Short but powerful, tough but uncompromisingly honest, you'll read this gem in one sitting, and the severe, often darkly humorous observations of Thurber's narrator Raymond will remain in the mind long after reading.

54 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2012

About the author

An American author renown for his "exceedingly brief" short fiction, Bob Thurber's work has received a long list of awards, appeared in hundreds of publications, including Esquire, and been anthologized over 70 times.

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fairytale that every child knows, and perhaps every little girl still struggles to embody, even in such cynical times as these, is that of Cinderella. The story itself, of course, is a story about hope, perfect love, a story that both truly possesses and defines a fairytale ending, when the Prince fits the lone glass slipper with its mate upon the delicate foot of Cinderella. Bob Thurber’s novelette, Cinderella She was Not, just as its negation of the iconic fairytale character suggests, begins a disturbing noiresque narrative, with Allen Ginsberg’s quote, “It isn’t enough for your heart to break, for we are all broken hearted, now”--a declaration that all human beings are living in a bleak, blighted, hopeless landscape of despair, a pronouncement that we all exist in a loveless aftermath—a startling contrast to the “happily ever after” of its namesake’s storyline. And like Rene Magritte’s meticulously executed painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images, where he writes beneath “This is not a pipe,” Thurber explores this obscure middle ground between what is and what is not within man’s eternal plight to find solace from a life of solitude where all men are alone and where a personal god is at best, distracted.
The reader, through the course of Thurber’s poignant novelette, follows the deconstruction of Raymond Masterson’s marriage to Alice Porter, one of three daughters of Rhode Island drugstore tycoon, Sam Porter, only to end up in the arms of a relationship built upon the crown of a meteoric wrecking ball. We go to bars, strip clubs, cabarets, claustrophobic restaurants and writer’s garrets, as Masterson, in his pursuit of true love and companionship, parallels his potential clients’ pathetic and futile search for gems in his catalog of cheap imitation jewelry, a sideline to his writing.
Thurber, in the telling of this tale, is relentless with his prose, which like handling fiberglass insulation, comes out in shards, gets under the skin, stays with the reader. In a voice that is at once hardboiled, and yet softened by an echoing ennui, Thurber exposes the complete disimpassioned lethargy of his protagonist, which could mirror that of the reader’s, when it comes to directing his own course—a course that he professes the reader as well as he should “use as a sort of teaching tool for…children.”
As readers take this journey with protagonist, Raymond Masterson, it becomes evident that Masterson has given up on life, just as life has given up on him, or more accurately was never in support of him, never took a personal interest. Rather than taking life by the horns, Masterson succumbs to life, and lets life happen to him, almost passive aggressively. And through this stance Masterson feels by his example that there is a lesson to be learned, and namely that, “life doesn’t care about us,” but we live it anyway, just to see what happens next.
And what does happen? Fate, as suggested by the three Porter sisters, Alice, Polly, and Jodie, will fuck you, or almost fuck you, at least leave you a tad rearranged. In the end, due to self-loathing that is perhaps the “coldness in us all” which Thurber wishes to save us from, all three will leave you dissatisfied, hollow, reamed clean as a torpedo tube, and a prisoner of our own solitude. The lesson is not so much that this is the state of the world, for Thurber does not talk down to his reader, but rather how humans behave, and choose to live in spite of this: how we all look to jam meaning into an opaque existence. In the end, suggests Thurber, people are desperate princes clutching single glass slippers, wandering aimlessly through a life that offers no answers, looking for what will fit into the structures we maintain, looking for what is in the all that is not. Struggling to hang onto a thin veneer of sanity as if it was a cloak of chainmail, deflecting loneliness and despair, man stumbles and rages against a life that relentlessly reminds him of his inadequacies, and that, Thurber contends, is simply no fairytale. Cinderella, She Was Not is a stunning performance from Mr. Thurber and one that will not leave the reader upon closing this thin, sharp, penetrating letter to mankind.

[Christine M Skynar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short good

Good story, the ending left me a little flat. The story could have kept going and I would have preferred that

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Novelette" isn't a term I hear bandied about very often, but it's a form that I admire greatly. Longer than a short story, even shorter than a novella, it's a real test of an author's skill to excise superfluous material while still delivering enough substance to keep the reader engaged. In my opinion, Thurber pulls it off well.