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Pretending to Say No
A collection of eleven short stories and one novella that exposes the seedier side of life in the city
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
66 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Benderson
48 books47 followersBruce Benderson is a novelist, essayist, journalist, and translator.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 20, 2008
Brilliant writing and every story is engaging. Every word had me wanting more. This book is imaginative beyond anything I've read. I talk about the first story in the book to people it is that clever.
February 19, 2017
A bit heavy on the crack smoke, but this was the early 90s. I enjoyed the odd breaks in narrative, and the black, black humor.
October 20, 2023
The writer is definitely an original voice with a mixed collection of mostly enjoyable short stories and one novella which kind of needed to be fleshed. He deals with the sexual and criminal underclass- The funniest story is the first "Just Say No" when first lady Nancy Reagan visits a drug dealing household in the Bronx.
July 7, 2024
(spelling corrected in July 2024)
"A group of crack addicts receives a bizarre visit from a drug-fighting First Lady...a young man dangerous sexual encounter is played against his tender concern for his elderly mother...a text book editor imagines the intimate life of a mysterious street hustler. It's a world most of us cross the street to avoid. But in Bruce Benderson's 'Pretending to Say No'...the dark underbelly of New York street life rises to the surface. These are stories that put into print the words of the socially voiceless and the anguish of the middle class struggling to escape the voices they have found. Benderson has the astonishing ability to tell each of his stories from the depths and heights of different economic classes. With clarity and ease he leads us into the forbidden zones of street life. Powerful, vivid, bizarre, and sometimes hilariously funny, these are stories that capture the frightening drama of people on the edge." From the back cover of the Plume of the 1990 paperback edition of this book.
This is a collection of extremely good but not great stories. If I had read them twenty years ago I am sure my opinion would have been far more laudatory but I come to these stories having read Mr. Benderson's 1994 masterpiece 'User' and it is clear that these stories stories while not exactly forerunners are, in their outlook, temperament and passion, embryonic of that later work.
I am perhaps being too dismissive, these stories are, many of them, comic gems. My greatest reservation is with the novella 'The Mass Production of Teenagers' which to me reads like a collection of the brilliant ideas you get when stoned and as if they were written down in that state. Despite the story of the man from Porlock destroying forever the poetic train of Coleridge's opium fueled dreams of Kubla Khan it is the exception that proves the sad rule that drugs may inspire but do not aid the creation of literature. Only the hard slog of work does that.
Drugs, crack cocaine in particular, is everywhere in these stories, but then it was everywhere in the years these stories were written. Even if you weren't taking coke it infected the zeitgeist in ways that permeated everything, like the earlier saturation of paper money with powdered cocaine. I see nothing wrong with this but then I am close enough, though not contemporary, with Mr. Benderson. When I was young the young consumed their youth with abuse of drink, drugs, cigarettes, sex, experience, novelty, rebellion, passion and a great deal of depression and despair. We were stupid and I wouldn't recommend those things to today's youth but neither do I want to, nor could I have lived, the way they do. But I didn't have to because I was living in the world my and Mr. Benderson's parents had created while the young of today live in the world I and Mr. Benderson's generations failed to change.
There is hardly any need to seek this collection out as all Mr. Benderson's short fiction has now been collected together and that may be a better place for the neophyte coming upon his work for the first time to go. I rather like finding these collections in their natal state - they are time capsules. That these stories do not pack the punch they should is testament to Mr. Benderson's great development as an author in his later works like 'User' and 'The Romanian'.
"A group of crack addicts receives a bizarre visit from a drug-fighting First Lady...a young man dangerous sexual encounter is played against his tender concern for his elderly mother...a text book editor imagines the intimate life of a mysterious street hustler. It's a world most of us cross the street to avoid. But in Bruce Benderson's 'Pretending to Say No'...the dark underbelly of New York street life rises to the surface. These are stories that put into print the words of the socially voiceless and the anguish of the middle class struggling to escape the voices they have found. Benderson has the astonishing ability to tell each of his stories from the depths and heights of different economic classes. With clarity and ease he leads us into the forbidden zones of street life. Powerful, vivid, bizarre, and sometimes hilariously funny, these are stories that capture the frightening drama of people on the edge." From the back cover of the Plume of the 1990 paperback edition of this book.
This is a collection of extremely good but not great stories. If I had read them twenty years ago I am sure my opinion would have been far more laudatory but I come to these stories having read Mr. Benderson's 1994 masterpiece 'User' and it is clear that these stories stories while not exactly forerunners are, in their outlook, temperament and passion, embryonic of that later work.
I am perhaps being too dismissive, these stories are, many of them, comic gems. My greatest reservation is with the novella 'The Mass Production of Teenagers' which to me reads like a collection of the brilliant ideas you get when stoned and as if they were written down in that state. Despite the story of the man from Porlock destroying forever the poetic train of Coleridge's opium fueled dreams of Kubla Khan it is the exception that proves the sad rule that drugs may inspire but do not aid the creation of literature. Only the hard slog of work does that.
Drugs, crack cocaine in particular, is everywhere in these stories, but then it was everywhere in the years these stories were written. Even if you weren't taking coke it infected the zeitgeist in ways that permeated everything, like the earlier saturation of paper money with powdered cocaine. I see nothing wrong with this but then I am close enough, though not contemporary, with Mr. Benderson. When I was young the young consumed their youth with abuse of drink, drugs, cigarettes, sex, experience, novelty, rebellion, passion and a great deal of depression and despair. We were stupid and I wouldn't recommend those things to today's youth but neither do I want to, nor could I have lived, the way they do. But I didn't have to because I was living in the world my and Mr. Benderson's parents had created while the young of today live in the world I and Mr. Benderson's generations failed to change.
There is hardly any need to seek this collection out as all Mr. Benderson's short fiction has now been collected together and that may be a better place for the neophyte coming upon his work for the first time to go. I rather like finding these collections in their natal state - they are time capsules. That these stories do not pack the punch they should is testament to Mr. Benderson's great development as an author in his later works like 'User' and 'The Romanian'.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews