A Billfold Book Review: Karen Bender’s ‘Refund’

I won’t take book review requests from everyone, but Counterpoint Press sent me an advance copy of Karen Bender’s new book Refund and I will tell you right away that — to borrow the cliché — I couldn’t put it down.

Here’s what you need to know:

Refund is a collection of short stories that deal with our favorite topic: “Money. Who has it. Who doesn’t. How you get it. How you don’t.”

The first story, “Reunion,” is my favorite and the one I didn’t want to see end. I don’t want to give away the plot, but Bender’s evocative prose takes us immediately to a place that we recognize, even if we haven’t yet lived there ourselves:

They were married; one child came into their home, then another. The children sat in their pink and blue onesies, smiling, toothless, but she was aware that the hats shaped like puppy ears, the outfits decorated with trains and cats and roses were useful in distracting parents from noticing the darkness; from the breathless, gasping love the children elicited and that made the parents sit up in the middle of the night, listening. They were always listening; there was always a simmering fear.

It’s this simmering fear that drives the stories.

The fear of not having enough money is intertwined, throughout the book, with the fear of failing as a parent: fear of pregnancy, fear of children that refuse to listen or behave, fear of giving children too much or not being able to give enough. Fear of what the children will think if the money disappears. The ovearching fear that children will see through their parents’ attempt to control this fear; that, as Bender writes in the collection’s final story “What the Cat Said,” the children “would recognize our lameness, our failure — and theirs — to live forever.”

Many of the stories also contain what you might call contemporary violence: school shootings, public shootings, 9/11 as the inciting incident in the title story “Refund,” which — metaphorically — is about how all of us want our lives back to the way they were, before the fear. As the characters learn, there is no amount of money that can make this fear go away.

(Of course, there’s a point to be made about how the fear was always there — it wasn’t a 9/11 thing, it’s just that many of us who came of age during that time associate it as a before-and-after. There’s also a point to be made about privilege and middle-class fear vs. fear of true poverty or lack of opportunity. This book is only about a specific kind of fear, but it tells that story well.)

I loved Refund. Highly recommended.

If you’d like to use the comment space to discuss the simmering financial fears in your own life, it’s there for you. My simmering fear is always that I will lose all my freelance clients and stop earning money and, because of that, lose “everything.” My other simmering fear is that I will have done the math wrong and my cash flow won’t give me enough cash to pay my bills. I do the math a lot to make sure I haven’t missed anything. It doesn’t calm the fear.

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