Traffic jam

Here’s something we’ve never seen in a novel before: pull quotes. Like the big excerpted quote you see to the right on this page, Chicago author Cris Mazza’s new novel Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls (Emergency Press, $16) features the kind of page design typically reserved for newspapers and magazines. It’s a little upending to have part of the fictional narrative repeated and re-emphasized, but it works in creating a journalistic feel in a book about one woman’s reactions to a human-rights crisis.

“That was my publisher’s idea,” says Mazza, a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “He wanted people to be able to flip through the book and have something pull them in, just like in a newspaper or magazine. I thought it was a great idea. I wish it was mine.”

There are plenty of Mazza’s ideas circulating through Various Men, the story of Hester Smith (like many of Mazza’s characters, she’s assumed a false name), a woman working in a plant nursery in Southern California. After witnessing two naked teenage girls tearing through the fields at the edge of her nursery, she soon discovers that her workplace borders a sex-trafficking site, where girls are brought from Tijuana and pimped to migrant workers. Though her initial instinct is to dip back into her j-school days and write an exposé, she quickly rules it out, denying that one feature could effect any real change. Instead, she decides to rescue one of the girls, and begins hatching frustratingly hesitant plans.

Her investigation instigates and tangles with some excavation of her own past. When she was in college, she entered into a complicated relationship with her mentor, and almost slept with him. She later discovers that while she was interested in her mentor, he was sleeping with a 16-year-old. The book, then, takes two fuzzy paths: One into Hester’s past to understand what happened, and one into her future and her potential rescue attempt.

The book has as its ballast a clear human-rights issue: The trafficking of underage girls across the border from Tijuana, a massive sex-slave trade that has received only passing interest in the mainstream media, but has provoked outcries from the nonprofit sector. And yet, the novel takes a surprising turn, focusing more on the inner turmoil of Hester. Mazza says she wasn’t motivated to expose the sex trade when writing. In fact, it was almost the opposite.

“If anything, I was animated more by the knowledge that the novel would have almost no effect,” says Mazza. “The novel is steeped with the kind of helplessness that a person with no real power often feels.”

Instead of becoming the hero she imagined, Hester begins to imagine the life of the 16-year-old girl who slept with her former teacher, and eventually sets up a meeting with her. What starts out as a mission to right a wrong becomes more of a journey inward, assessing her own failures and responsibility for what happened in the past. Likewise, guilt pervades as she becomes enmeshed in her own small drama while the trauma of the sex slaves plays out within arm’s reach.

Mazza has made a career of crafting provocative fiction, from her famous short story “Is It Sexual Harassment, Yet?” to her editing of two “Chick Lit” anthologies, which, as she said, “used that term very ironically, whereas now it’s used very literally.” Various Men continues in that tradition of pushing buttons and raising questions: Does a 16-year-old have more control than we think? Should a man who sleeps with an underage girl be granted empathy? And how do we contextualize our own smaller tragedies in the face of mammoth social issues?

Mazza’s fiction provokes in a way that journalism could never try.

“All I know is I take my characters to a place where they will never be able to look at their lives in the same way,” she says. “In a lot of ways, I’m provoking myself.”

Mazza celebrates Various Men’s release Thursday 27 at May St. Cafe.

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