Review: “Fast Machine” by Elizabeth Ellen

One thing I’ve learned from going to therapy (like every other college student these days) and reading Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins is that it is healthy to write down your feelings. Write down your memories of one who has died, write out your anger in a diary, make lists of pros and cons for hard decisions. Write a short story to escape reality; or, alternatively, write a short story to make sense of reality. Reading Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen is like peering into the mind of someone as they do exactly that. You can almost see, through the pages, the cogs and wheels of her brain turning as she tries to work through or work out something in her life.

With its reoccurring characters and a narrator that usually reflects Ellen herself, many of the stories in Fast Machine feel autobiographical to someone who has never met nor is very familiar with Ellen. If you really wanted to, you could probably make a chronology of boyfriends, lovers, and husbands that pass through this narrator’s life. However, in an interview with Noah Cicero for HTMLGIANT, Ellen states that all the stories, besides “How I Stopped Loving Dave Eggers and Stole Your MFA,” are fiction. “Or,” she continued, “some mix of fact and fiction.” The relevance of the author to a piece of literature will always be debated in literary criticism, but the way Ellen explores her characters and scenes—a string of lovers (writers, druggies), a schizophrenic husband, single motherhood, a desolate Midwest—is refreshing enough to wonder about the inspiration behind them.

As far as first story collections go, Ellen’s has more pages than most. (368, to be exact.) If reading the collection straight through, there are points when the characters and themes get repetitive; there is the doomed relationship with an ex-boyfriend or married man, a woman with low self-esteem who is desperate for love, sex, drugs, and self-destruction. Many of the noticeably short pieces in the collection, those that are less than half a page, feel like well-crafted flash fiction fillers, like any that are scattered across the world wide web. As you work your way through the collection, however, the reoccurring themes work to build a sort of (perhaps unintentional) narrative in your head that unifies the stories. These stories also help to make Ellen’s most powerful and original work stand out that much more.

In a world where fiction is getting (in my humble opinion) increasingly weirder and shorter, Ellen stands out as someone who is able to successfully make a statement by touching on current alternative tendencies without taking them too far, as well as someone whose best work is her longer stories. “Winter Haven, Florida, 1984” and “Halfsies” (the last story in the collection), both fairly lengthy in comparison to the other stories, and both about a young girl exploring lesbian tendencies, will stay in my mind for a long time.

Ellen gives her readers the courtesy of being honest. Without flinching or speaking through euphemisms and riddles, her stories touch on topics that are often taboo in society. What stood out to me most, among many topics, was her frankness in regards to self-injury. “[I] carved Gage’s and my initials into my arm with an X-ACTO knife,” Ellen nonchalantly describes in “Fistful.”

The multiple stories about having a schizophrenic husband were especially original and moving. (The public, largely informed by shows such as CSI, in which psychotics are depicted solely as serial killers, could use much more of Ellen’s non-judgmental and humane depiction of psychosis.) “Elvis,” a story about a grown woman having a sexual relationship with a teenage boy, and “More or Less,” a short piece about a mother’s love for her daughter waxing and waning based on her daughter’s weight, are equally painfully honest.

Fast Machine is a powerful and haunting story collection that is well-written and well-executed, able to be read as a whole or in little snippets. Playing witness to one person’s raw attempt to figure out this gigantic mess called life, even if it’s fictional, is not something one can easily brush aside after closing the book shut.