Book Review: The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen

The Hypothetical Girl
Stories by Elizabeth Cohen
ISBN-13: 978-1590515822
Other Press, August 2013
$14.95; 256pp.
Reviewed by Edmund Zagorin

Thematic short stories are often dangerously collected, insofar as they are more directly commensurate and thus invite superlative comparison. Cohen’s collection presents variations on the themes of online dating and romantic love, both requited and un-, successful and un- , often the latter. And yet, she manages to avoid the pitfalls of themed collections to an appealing extent, achieving a certain presence within a still-quite-awkward terrain of digital romance.

“Death by Free Verse” features genuine limericks. They are exchanged between Louis and Myra, the latter who is “…an actual poet. An MFA-degree-carrying, poetry-teaching poet who worked with the Connecticut “Poetry in Schools” program.” Just to let us know that Cohen is perhaps having a little fun with us at her own (or our own) expense. The prickly thing about this limerick exchange is that, like all such exchanges, the level of mutuality implied by the missives is anxiously unknowable. He loves me? He loves me not. It’s worth noting that many of Cohen’s characters have this sort of prickly quality to them, which manifests in that effusive tension of both wanting to engage yet not wanting to appear overly invested in the budding relationships with the mostly unknown but hypothetically Significant Others-to-be. Her protagonists (with one exception, women) are shrewd mate-shoppers, at times vulnerable but strictly practical and entirely unwilling to compromise for what they want in a man.

This style of protagonist appears interchangeably in Cohen’s writing as a poet, an artist, a writer, a teacher, a community-oriented, organics munching and essentially yuppified daydreamer (“Animal Dancing,” “People Who Live Far, Far Away,” “The Opposite of Love,” and “Boat Man” are a few examples.) In “Boat Man”, Allison is an earth-works hobbyist and “The Hypothetical Girl”‘s Emily has a New York City therapist, a Saks wardrobe and thinks nothing of having casually dipped off for a jaunt around Micronesia. Cohen’s laudable women are cerebral and effusive, filled with treasurehouses of language and artistry. Cohen’s ideal men are makers, craftsmen like “Life Underground”‘s Max, who says he is a handyman and can fix things or “The Man Who Makes Whirligigs” who makes wind chimes in addition to the eponymous widget. Everyone is very warm and neurotic and breathy and even when things go slightly wrong no one really gets hurt. There are not a ton of nonwhite people or poor people wandering around Cohen’s fictive universes. Her characters don’t really struggle with material deprivation, and even if they aren’t wealthy they are comfortable, unfamiliar with cancelled aspirations or the vissitudes of daily survival. This basically bourgeois sensibility comes across in her narrators’ inattention to the passage of time outside of their qwerty wooings, days and weeks which slide languidly by, unremarkable and unnoticed. Her women show far more concern about the biological clock of their ovaries (compressed under the expectations that they someday might raise a family) than the time-clock of any wage worker. This specter of middle class parental judgment, usually Jewish in tone, hovers menacingly in the wings.

The Louis of “Death by Free Verse”‘ appears only as Myra’s obscure object of desire, entirely textual and often unavailable. He is always jetting off to far-flung backpacking excursions of questionable reality and creating (or forcing) caesurae into their exchanges, which leaves Myra sympathetically tied up in angst-knots. This story demonstrates one component of the “online dating; have you *actually* done it? y/n” as a potential schism of reader-interpretation, a unique feeling of prolonged anticipation which forms as a substitute for affection, a feeling which Cohen perfectly captures here with the word “smitten” (“”And I think you are cute too. I will be honest, I am smitten.” / “Smitten?” / “Smitten.””). This vital-yet-subterranean opening towards amorous possibility appears in several other stories: “humming” in “Love, Really”, “puffing up” in “Boat Man”, and so on. Perhaps this reviewer is overgeneralizing, but anyone who has begun online dating, for whatever reason, must at some point encounter this feeling, a feeling unique to conversations made of text that last for weeks or even months, upon which part of your daily fantasies must eventually come to depend. Other people can be habit-forming and this heart-flutter is the high, even at a great distance. Is one trying too hard or not hard enough? Cohen captures this delicate sensation of romantic hope with precision and adeptness.

When the feeling of lightness becomes more important than the reality of the other person, the incentive to advance the relationship into the realm of the extra-textual becomes tangled. Herein lies the unique frustration of online dating — it offers limitless opportunity for self-invention, or even for honest but selectively positive self-portrayals which too-rosily advertise the prospective “date”, particularly when one’s imagination is roused to fill in details about a hypothetical lover. But, if the digital flirting is to have a non-digital purpose, then eventually both parties must agree to a physical encounter in the panicked universe of blemished faces and brick-and-mortar tawdriness. And therein lies the rub. Because if what Cohen choreographs for much of her stories are a mating dance of virtual masks, profiles and self-portraits, and salacious late-night chat or texting sessions, then the first date IRL (in real life) is almost inevitably revealed as a harrowing disappointment, though often mutually so. This tension between people’s curated self-image and their warts-and-all embodied selves produces much of Cohen’s profounder moments of reflection, loneliness, and the basic desire for satisfying and affectionate companionship that ubiquitous social media has rendered poignant and even painful.

The best story in the collection is titled “The Opposite of Love”. Whereas many of the other stories tip-toe around tragic dimensions of their quasi-trysts, this story dives right in with a self-aware verve, providing a real and compelling answer to the question posed by its enigmatic title. Rita, an isolated novelist, is given a college-level teaching job instructing students about literary irony on the same day she is diagnosed with breast cancer. The online romance theme remains tangential within the story and does not involve Rita directly but rather Hendrik and Anna, two patients in her online cancer support group who live on opposite sides of the world. They begin virtually canoodling during the cancer support group’s public chat and before long have retreated into a “locked” chatroom, defining a digital equivalence of intimacy. When tragedy strikes suddenly, Hendrik is bereft and Rita is struck with an epiphany on the nature of love; that it must be the opposite of irony. Difference is not internally opposed despite its contradictions; rather, it is only the opposite of indifference; passion rather than numbness.

Hypothetical Girl is a daring biopsy of what is rapidly becoming the dominant romantic conundrum; love between absolute strangers,. Skittish of creeps and weirdos — yet also curious and bored enough to try something new — Cohen’s women manage to negotiate love and loss by trying too hard and failing in ways that make us grin ruefully with the familiarity of our own missteps. If Cohen’s stories portend anything for new media literature more broadly, perhaps it is that the pervasiveness of screens in which to tap our sweet nothings has rewritten the classic script of seduction for good. In this era of Carlos Danger, writers must ignore the obsolescence of the pre-Internet courtship at their own peril.

Edmund Zagorin is a writer and argument teacher in Detroit, USA and Iowa City, USA. His novelesque Sorry, Our Unicorn Has Rabies is serialized electronically through Jukepop and he curates the monthly print broadsheet Stories By Mail. Read his data-fossils @multiplicit.