Bienen’s Debut Fiction Collection Shifts Sharply in Tone and Locale

CHICAGO --- The protagonists in Leigh Buchanan Bienen’s fiction are often outsiders, including a precocious African parrot that offers provocative perspectives about his quarrelsome owners as he plucks his once beautiful chest almost clean. The couple’s initial enthusiasm about the aging parrot disappears with his feathers, leading him and a fat gray cat to commiserate about the deplorable spiritual condition of their custodians.

"The Left-Handed Marriage" (Ontario Review Press, June 2001), Bienen’s debut collection of fiction, ranges widely in subject matter in such stories as the award-winning "My Life as a West African Parrot," published originally in the Ontario Review and then in the O. Henry awards anthology. Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law, draws upon her extensive travels and legal experience to tell stories with a distinct sense of place and authenticity. The collection shifts in tone and locale, from legal drama to domestic comedy, from Kampala and Shanghai to Trenton.

"It is difficult for me to remember the jungle, the sun in Africa or my days in the dark pet shop owned by the blind-eyed Indian," notes the introspective parrot in the story about his life.

The parrot’s insights into the self-centered humans who observe him are rendered in haunting language peppered with irony.

"My yellow eyes can see behind a necklace of stones to the throb at the throat, behind thick tweed to the soft folds of the belly, to the dark roots of hair which has been falsely hennaed to a color which is a poor imitation of the red wings of the Amazonian parrot."

In "Technician," Bienen creates a markedly different slice of American life with Tommy Angelino, an unemployed and aimless young man who stumbles into the job of pulling the switch on death row, becoming a bit player in one of the most contentious controversies of our time.

Beginning in a small wooden house in Trenton, N.J., the story is propelled forward with bold language that brings alive Tommy’s new status as "a man with a car, a house, a job and a wife." The 23-year-old moves between his home and his office, a subdivided square room with one tiny barred window looking out onto the parking lot, puzzling over the "execution technician" duties buried in the obscure gray language of the state.

He offers chilling and often comedic insights into the mind-numbing bureaucracy of trying to put people to death. Thanks to endless death penalty appeals and the ensuing down time on the job, Tommy also becomes a courtroom regular and commentator on the flesh and blood realities of the law.

"The prosecutors would hang a desperate man who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving children, and the defense attorneys would ask the jury to recommend the most rabid mass murderer for outpatient counseling. The judges fell asleep on the bench, or didn’t understand the arguments and the police shot 12-year-old kids in the back when they ran down the alley. Meanwhile those on bail or on parole, or awaiting trial went on crime sprees as if violence was about to go out of style."

In "The Left-Handed Marriage," the title story of the collection, a trip to Kenya inspires a bizarre marital arrangement designed by the wife of a bored corporate lawyer who makes "more money than he could have spent." Africa’s deep effect on the wife is reflected in lush language about the land and the people, about zebras and gazelles grazing "at the alert, raising their heads and quickly looking over their withers for danger, herds of hundreds, once they had been thousands, always on the move." Initially designed to please the husband, the left-handed marriage takes twists and turns that challenge the high-powered lawyer’s belief "that a person with a respected position who appeared to be playing by the rules could get away with anything -- theft, adultery, fraud or even bigamy."

Comedy and pathos set the tone in the collection’s "He Was a Big Boy," a dramatic monologue by a white public defender, counseling the mother of a young, mentally impaired black defendant. A near-fatal accident to a performer in "The Circus Comes to Kampala" transforms two mocking spectators into highly capable, compassionate adults. Hints of a man’s frail hold on life permeate the mood of "To China," a story about an artist whose clever letters to a lover brim with cross-cultural impressions. And "After Chekov" revolves around stolen moments of a wealthy young wife during her vacation with her son at the Grande Hotel on Atlantic City’s boardwalk.

"The Left-Handed Marriage" also includes "We Are All Africans," "The First Secretary" and "My Mothers’ Lovers." The book is dedicated to Bienen’s husband, Northwestern University President Henry Bienen, with whom she visited, sometimes for extended periods, the countries in Africa and Asia featured in the book.

Since 1995, Bienen has been teaching at Northwestern University School of Law in the areas of criminal law, not-for-profit institutions and law and social science. Her courses always emphasize writing about the law. Her latest project on a handwritten data set of Chicago homicides, maintained by Chicago police from 1870 to 1930, was the subject of a conference she hosted in November and was featured in an article in The Washington Post in March.

Conference participants were given the data set of 11,000 homicide cases that Bienen and her research associates transcribed and systematized, preserving the highly stylized penmanship and rhetorical flourishes expressive of Chicago’s notorious past. The papers from the conference and essays from other scholars will be published in 2001 in a special symposium issue of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at Northwestern University School of Law. An edited book on the historical homicides will follow.

Bienen is also the co-author of two non-fiction books, "Crimes of the Century" (Northeastern University Press, November 1998), chosen as an "Editor’s Choice" in the Chicago Tribune, and "Jurors and Rape" (1980).

Previously she was an assistant deputy public defender and the director of the Special Projects Section of the New Jersey Department of the Public Advocate in Trenton, N.J. That work resulted in a series of published opinions and numerous legal articles on topics including rape, sex offenders, capital punishment and juries. She also was one of the principal investigators in the Public Defender Homicide Study on the re-imposition of capital punishment, which was presented in two reports to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Bienen also has worked as a journalist and an editor. Her fiction has been published in the Ontario Review, the Mississippi Review, Panache, Descant, Triquarterly and The O. Henry Prize