Critical essay on The Star Cafe by Mary Caponegro

¶ … Star Cafe by Mary Caponegro

Written in a surrealistic and sexualized style that immediately captures the reader's attention, Mary Caponegro's dazzling short story The Star Cafe was originally published 1990 as part of the author's larger collection of short stories. Through her combination of strikingly original language and strong storytelling skills, Caponegro succeeds in transforming the abstract yearnings which consume Carol, the protagonist of The Star Cafe, into a coherent and creative narrative capable of captivating readers from the first lines onward. Indeed, the opening line of The Star Cafe signals the dreamlike tone to come in later pages, as Caponegro guides us through the maze of Carol's thoughts after she hears a mysterious noise, remarking that "after she heard the noise she was only a third involved in each of these tasks and a third involved in trying to figure out where the noise had come from -- though of course these things could not be measured like sugar or flour" (23). By so accurately describing the complexity of human consciousness in real time, through the meandering thought process Carol engages in throughout the story, Caponegro succeeds in achieving every great fiction writer's ultimate goal: the replication of ordinary existence in extraordinary prose.

The plot of The Star Cafe is centered on Carol's encounter with a stranger who may or may not be real, and the increasingly intimate experience she shares with him while trapped in her own fantasies. When Carol and the strange figure eventually make love, she becomes fixated on the mirrored walls surrounding her, providing incongruent reflections in which only her body appears to be present. This clever literary device employed by Caponegro allows Carol, along with the reader, to "witness the bleak absurdity of her body making love to the atmosphere," a revelation which compels her to consider the disturbing fact that "she could be alone the rest of her life; she knew how" (29). The majority of the story takes place in this ephemeral dream world, one which is only opened to Carol after she impulsively chooses to walk through a door which is both literal and metaphorical. The resulting array of sexual and personal awakenings Carol endures is at once illuminating and disturbing, because she appears to be simultaneously invigorated by sensual pleasure and imprisoned by guilt and self doubt. When Carol begins questioning her own interpretations of the visual images and physical sensations she is subjected to, asking "maybe he'd climaxed. But she suspected he had a completely different kind of sexuality, not based on that system" (Caponegro 32), the reader is challenged to question the basic assumptions guiding their own life. This ability to convey the common themes of modern life, in this case the continual questioning of reality and its meaning, through the brilliant depiction of abstract thoughts is the most admirable aspect of Caponegro's haunting story.