Self Storage **

Using Walt Whitman as her ally, Gayle Brandeis' Self Storage brings readers a pleasant chick-lit respite from their everyday routines.

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Flannery Parker is a bored-but-curious housewife living with two children in UC Riverside Student Family Housing, waiting for her unmotivated husband to finish his dissertation so she can enroll in college herself. To exercise her inquisitive nature while she waits, she frequents local auctions of self storage lockers and sells her unearthed treasures at weekly yard sales to create some income while her husband is in school. Though she loves her auction community and the hidden gems she finds, she yearns for the day when she can go to college in Oregon and live a life where her thirst for knowledge will always be satisfied.

She feels stagnant in her routines until the day she bids on a single cardboard box in a storage locker, and finds inside a slip of the paper with the word "YES" written on one side, and an address on the other. After returning the box to the address written on the paper and meeting the lively and artistic person involved, Flan decides that she needs to begin seeking her own "yes" with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as her guide: "To stave off my looming funk, I decided to do an experiment. I wanted to find out what made me say 'Yes' inside. A very Whitmanesque quest, it seemed to me."

Her search for "Yes" eventually leads to a curiosity of her ethnically diverse student housing community, especially her reclusive Afghan neighbor who is always covered in a burqa.

Set in 2002 (i.e. immediate post-9/11 America), Self Storage seeks to address the time period's fear of the unknown as well as Flan's own hesitance toward venturing outside her own comfort zone, both in terms of her community's ethnic tensions as well as issues in her own person life.

There are some incidental weaknesses that come with a novel based on entertainment. Brandeis wrote her first draft of Self Storage during National Novel Writing Month, and though that draft has been heavily edited to create this novel, there is evidence of some momentary inspiration that doesn't quite work.

Some passages seem rushed, some important characters (especially Sodaba, the Afghan neighbor) are underdeveloped, her literary devices, though innovative, often seem forced and some sections of the novel rely too much on excerpts from Whitman's Song of Myself to create meaning.

Despite these criticisms, Self Storage is a respectable contribution to its genre; that is, it addresses themes of love and gender with a creative exterior narrative that will be most appealing to young women. This book is especially distinguishable from other works of chick-lit since it addresses contemporary social issues.

Brandeis is no stranger to this type of writing she is a recipient of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature for Social Change for her 2003 novel, The Book of Dead Birds.

[HTML_REMOVED] Claire Fox

arts@thedaily.washington.edu