Review: Will I Now Have This Pleasure

 Review of Madeleine Sherbondy’s Will I Now Have This Pleasure 

Maddie is my nephew’s girlfriend, and this is a chapbook published by a small press at Susquehanna University, but that doesn’t keep me from being awfully impressed.  

Everything else is a <spoiler> 

Maddie describes herself as interested in Bible “fan fiction.” After reading this, I see why that’s sort of accurate, but it doesn’t imply the subtlety or the ambition of what she’s doing. I guess, for me, “fan fiction” suggests something trivial, like a lounge act performing a cover of a familiar song. This is more like a serious jazz musician interpreting a standard – most of the same notes are there, but the result is dramatically different. 

This is the story of Sarah laughing at the idea of conceiving in her old age as a bewildered Abraham (here, Abe) tries to let himself believe in the promise that their children will one day be as numerous as the stars. (Though, for him, the stars are often no more than glow-in-the-dark stickers he has attached to the ceiling of their bedroom.) Abe has a vision of how he wants the world to be and, while he does seem to love Sarah, he loves her as much for her “womb” as for her own self. 

Meanwhile, Sarah has a radical openness to the world. The stunning opening paragraph tells us of the way she “unzips” her skin, stepping out of it as she readies to make love. (There’s a nice parallel with the way in which Maddie also turns the form of this Biblical story inside out.) Abe once did the same before her, but – as the story opens – he no longer does. As I read it, he has become someone alert to history and legacy – to abstraction. She, on the other hand, remains someone in love with the person in front of her. 

Or, as she comes to narrate it, “It was not always like this.” Abe’s change in ambition begins to close her off. When a friend of his – someone whose name she cannot bring herself to remember – offers, she sleeps with him. Soon after, she discovers she is pregnant; it has taken sex with someone other than Abe to make it possible. 

In a long stretch where the novella (long short story?) really opens up, she thinks about the growing fetus as it reaches the size of one fruit or another. When she has her abortion, the nurse – Lilith, a device cleverly taken from Midrashic story – plucks the “apple” sized fetus from her womb in what feels an Adam-and-Eve reference. 

In the powerful end, Sarah laughs at Abe’s bewilderment and frustration at the pregnancy test she reveals to him. He thinks he will become the patriarch he has prophesied he will be, but she has asserted an agency that has betrayed him. But “betray” is the wrong word. She has lived, lived in full. 

She laughs, then, not in triumph, not for perversely denying Abe anything, but because she has lived with the courage to open herself radically to the world and, though battered, to zip herself back into a skin of her own.</spoiler> 

Powerful stuff by a young writer I am honored to know first hand.