Author: ceridwenanne

We Have Wings on Our Backs: Autobiography of Red

The semester I spent in London, I went to the British Museum at least three times, which is not nearly enough. Most of the collection of artefacts from ancient Egypt was undergoing some sort of rehab at the time – you know, all the fancy stuff and sarcophogi and things. But there was a small display of everyday items: make-up kits, kitchen tools, hand mirrors, bits of fabric. I, like many kids, went through a pretty serious Egypt phase, but it was mostly centered on the mythology, not the archeology. Ancient Egypt was a place where gods rose up out of lotus flowers and wore the heads of strange beasts, where rivers ran backwards, a person had two souls, not one, where the writing danced with the shapes of cranes and men, where the earth was a man and the sky was a woman. It was a land of unreality, of dream, of reversals.

In some ways, I never realized that the people of ancient Egypt were real, were people with human bodies like mine, until I looked at the tin of face powder with its neat row of brushes with little numbers by the handles. I saw her then, brush in hand, blacking her eyes, whitening her face, carefully outlining her mouth in red the way I do when I go out and want to look pretty. She had a husband, some kids, and they’d gotten a babysitter for the first time in what felt like ages. She saw a movie and her husband drove the sitter home. They stayed up too late drinking wine and talking. In the morning, the kids woke them up early, and then they sat sleepily on the porch and watched the kids play in the rushes and fight companionably.

I’m not sure where this is going. This book makes me incoherent. I kind of want to stop trying to get it across to you and just order you to read it. Go read it. I just finished reading and I want to sing and and cry and write some stories, and I want to go back and read it again, and then I started doing that. Then I thought maybe it would be better to cry and type a bunch of anecdotal rubbish that only makes sense to me so I did that. Now I think I’ll do that some more.

I don’t have a good classical education, but at some point I was given a copy of Sappho: A Garland, which is a translation/collection of all of Sappho‘s extant poetry. Very few full poems of hers come down intact – mostly because someone else quoted her – and the rest is just fragments, sometimes whole lines, but also sometimes just a few words with big tears between them. These few whole poems were augmented by the discovery of scraps and bits wrapped around things like mummified crocodiles (I make this up not) dug out of the Mediterranean sand by colonial archaeologists. These fragments kill me. They make me burn with hunger.

For me*

neither honey
nor the bee

*

The moon has set
and the Pleiades; it is the middle
of the night and the hours go by
and I lie here alone.

*

golden chickpeas grew along the shore

*

In one of the reviews on Goodreads, the reviewer wonders if this book was written just for him, which is what I wonder too. Sappho was my fragmentary poetic love; a poet named Stesichoros was Anne Carson’s. She says he “came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” I loved Sappho for empathizing with Helen, in the poem that begins:

“Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.”

The poem ends with the personal, with Sappho, the poet, dropping her little argument about Troy and Helen and the place of those things in the world and howling with the ache of her lost lover. Homer was many good things, but he was a not a poet of the personal. His seas are always wine-dark, his dawns rosy-fingered, the blood black. Mimesis makes demands; remember this one adjective and not all the others. Remember the story, the fleet, the thronging cavalry. Sappho broke Homer open for me; Stesichoros did for Carson. Stesichoros was struck blind by Helen for calling her a whore. He wrote a reversal, and Helen reversed his blindness. Makes one wonder about the blindness of Homer, right? I’ve recently derided free verse as for the lazy, and then this came along and struck me blind. I’ve been broken open again. Ah, and I leak while I reverse.

Genyon, whose name meant red, who lived on a red island and kept a herd of red cattle was killed by Hercules for his cattle for one of Hercules’ Tasks. Carson writes this story like a heap of scraps falling out of a box, with a piece of Steinian meat thrown into it for good measure. So often poets are wankers, even the ones I love, because they write for other poets or for themselves or god knows what. The obfuscate, they allude, they conceal. They put their appendixes at the back and not the front. Carson is generous. She reverses this, and then she tells a story of the personal about a boy named Genyon who falls in love with a drifter named Herakles. Genyon is a monster with red wings, but then he isn’t. This isn’t simple allegory; unlike a Homeric story the nouns have adjectives that change and when the adjectives change, so too the nouns. The modern story is rended, it is torn, it is told in fragments and images. But it is also specific and it moves, like Zeno’s Paradox in free verse.

Another thing I saw in the Egyptian room was a wall painting that had all of the Egyptian paint still on it. They would carve the relief, and then paint over it in wild colors, but history and sand and blood has rubbed those colors off. Classicism in art is mistaken: there is not anything subtle and sepia about the Ancient world. They took out their make-up brushes and went dancing. And now I’m wrong again, they probably had wings too, because we still have them tied down to our backs under our jackets. When we fly no photograph can capture us until it’s all reversed.

Slightly Irregular Steampunk

I snapped The Slightly Irregular Fire Engineup at a local used bookseller because I’m kind of obsessed with steampunk, and a weird-ass kid’s book from the 70s that seems to have a steampunk aesthetic is right up my alley. The idea of Victorian futurism imagined by contemporary writers makes me all hot and bothered, but I’m often disappointed and/or enraged by how stilted the writing is, how fawning the depictions of Victoriana, or just how dumb. The Difference Engine, by Bruce Sterling & William Gibson, one of the very first full-blown steampunk novels, is pretty emblematic of my problem. The ideas are straight-up OMFG brilliant, but wrapped up in some fish-paper of boring and going-nowhere. (It’s not a huge surprise I feel this way: I heart Gibson for all his failings, but pretty much everything Sterling does makes me cringe. This includes Burning Man, Bruce, you douche.)

One of the more fascinating things about steampunk, as a cultural movement thingee, is that there’s huge disconnect between the literary branch and the Maker movement. Maker types build things, raise chickens in Brooklyn, try to master archaic technologies, and generally keep RadioShack in business. The more cosplay end dresses up in top hats, corsets, and goggles. I still haven’t bridged the gap between the lit and the doings, partially because the lit hasn’t bridged the gap between the costume and the ideas. The worst of the genre fetishizes Victorian reserve (or our imaginings of that reserve), blathering about “a simpler time” while totally ignoring class/race/colonialism, blah blah, you know. 

Anyhoo, now that I’ve gone off on a random digression, this book is arguably not steampunk at all – it’s too early – but it definitely clarified a lot of my somewhat useless ditherings about the genre. Barthelme takes a series of (often bizarre) Victorian etchings, mixes them up like Tarot cards, and divines an odd little tale out of the mix. It feels like one of those patched-up stories that gets written in that little game where one person writes a section, covers up everything but the last line, and then passes it to the next person, who writes a section, and so on. (Do you know the game I mean? That was great fun at summer camp.) 

The art is cool, but it’s clunkily done, simply not altered enough, or done with enough visual style, to be interesting. They read like cut-outs, which is what they are, but they lay as still as a game of Solitaire. The language, however, whoo-boy, this is nice. More please. A girl, Mathilda, wakes up to find a pagoda growing in her yard. She enters, looking for a fire-engine. Djinns, pirates, and other wackiness ensues. It’s winking, post-modern (amusingly, almost archaically post-modern at this point, which is something of a trip), and clever without making you feel dumb. Like this:

“Would you like to have an escapade?” the djinn asked. “We can arrange that. Escapades come in two styles – fancy and more fancy.” 

“What is an escapade” Mathilda asked. 

“An escapade is something you didn’t expect,” the djinn said, “which surprises you, pleases you, and frightens you, all that once.” 

“Like a good dream,” Mathilda said. 

“Or you could be something,” the djinn suggested. “You could be a grown-up tennis-playing hat-wearing woman, or a one-man band–”  

“The one-man band doesn’t look too happy,” Mathilda observed. 

“He began as a piccolo player,” the djinn said.

Hahahaha! Phew. I had to google this Barthelme cat, and I was pretty much entraced by what I found. Writer of micro-fiction, inveterate post-modernist, regular contributor to this and that fancy (and extra fancy) periodical. The bastions of wiki said he wasn’t much for the whole narrative thing, but there is one here, even as it winks and smirks. 

Maybe I find steampunk so fascinating because it’s a post-modern attempt to leapfrog back to before Modernism even questioned, well, anything: the Nation, the Psyche, the Individual, the Narrative, back before when you could capitalize those things and not look like you were a Jerk-Face who was making A Point. ZOMG. What origami! Instead of taking the mismatched deck and building a house, steampunk folds and cuts the cards into something that casts the shadow of the house, but looks like an absolute mess straight-on. The ones I dislike tend to be really perfunctory narratives dressed up in high boots and cleavage, or anti-(post)-modernist claptrap that totally doesn’t get where it’s coming from. Fascinating pedigree, this steampunk stuff has. 

So, I would start my rating for this with three stars, because I liked it, take one off for the art, add one for the steampunk flavor, and then add another just because it blew my mind a little bit. Yes!

This is Not a…Actually, it is Totally a Test. Pencils Up

I read This Is Not a Testby Courtney Summers in a sitting, absolutely bolting it down to get to the end. Which is funny, in a way, because while the pacing fairly rips along, not a whole hell of a lot actually happens. The story more or less starts in medias res once our surviving principles have made it to the high school* during a zombie apocalypse. Six teenagers have blockaded the doors and worked out how they will live on a day to day basis. Phew! We’re safe-ish! The narrative keeps peeking back to the week it took to get there, the loss of two of the party, but much of the story recounts their boredom and bickering, six kids passing time while they consider their own imminent deaths and the deaths of everyone around them. They find booze in the teachers’ lounge; they enact dubiously considered make-outs; they play basketball. 

Which, put that way, sounds like something horrible to read. But two things make it compelling for me. First, the main character, Sloane, is suicidal. Which is an interesting thing to be in a world where walking cannibal corpses are hungering for your flesh. Not long ago I watched Lars von Trier’s “Meloncholia” which has a similar set-up: a depressive managing the last days before the complete end of the world. Von Trier wrote this movie after he had a depressive episode, and in his reading about his state, found that the depressed do better in crisis situations – they don’t panic, because they expected this all along. They move coolly through trauma, because trauma is what they know on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s a dark way to think about it, but Sloane’s lack of affect and emotional deadness were a compelling lens on the usual panic, boredom, panic, speech about life’s preciousness, panic sometimes found in zombie stories. Like, I want to punch that little butterfly tattoo and all of its obnoxious symbolism at the end of Will Smith’s “I Am Legend.” Don’t you dare go all Christ-symbolism on the corpses of everyone I know. That dime store redemption cheapens everything that came before, even if what came before was tedious and boring and juvenile and dumb. 

Second, I’m just into Lifeboat-ish situations where people sit around bickering, and in that bickering gesture towards the ways we think society and government should be structured. That’s why I was hook-line-and-sinker for the first two seasons of Lost, the way those characters embodied world-views which are necessarily in conflict: the nihilist, the Lockeian (I mean, it’s right there in John Locke’s name), the Rousseauian, the followers and the would-be heroes. The governmental stuff is dampened a bit here, but there are echoes of Lord of the Flies, with the lone freshman in This is Not a Test standing in for the chorus of unnamed younger boys who shift their allegiances according to who has the political power in Lord of the Flies. In a sequence with an interloping teacher, the concept of “good” society intrudes, putting the kids’ détente into crisis. That was awesome. 

And third, even though I realize now I didn’t mention a third thing, I liked how Sloane has her own arc with her abuse by her father and abandonment by her sister, a person arc in all of the societal. I’m not exactly easy with the conclusion, especially with the sister, but I respect Sloane’s first person conclusion. Here is as good as any to complain about one thing: I found it hard to differentiate some of these boys, which led to some weird reading from me where I was like, what? She’s doing what with whom? That can’t be right, but then it wasn’t right because I’d mixed them up. As good as Sloane’s characterization is, the others’ sometimes lacks. Which makes a weird sense in a way, but is still confounding as a reader.

So. I enjoyed this greatly. I’m not sure how to wrap up, other than to say that this is a perfect example of why I loves me some zombie stories: the personal wending with the societal in a locked room with bloody hands on the glass. It even made me forgive the fact that these zombies can run, because that, my friends, is not right. 

*And, a goofy thing I enjoyed about their school: it is exactly like mine. South High in Minneapolis was built in the 70s, this almost military bunker style building with few windows and lots of concrete – a perfect place to ride out the zombie apocalypse. Of course, it was built that way because all of the paranoia about student protests of the era – keep us in or keep us out. South’s lack of windows also served to drive us completely mad come February; the few, wan sunlit hours of Midwestern winter spend in a pedagogical bunker. I remember when we’d get our class assignments, my friends and I would compare how many classes we had with windows. Score! I got three!

The Ones Who Walk Away from Panem: Hunger Games

Before I start into this review, I would like to pose a question. Why is it so hard to talk about the books we love? I have been having just an unrelenting bitch of a time writing this review. I keep falling into holes and back-pedaling, not wanting to sound too squee or insincere and bring ruination on my real love for this book. Maybe it’s because it’s YA, about a plucky girl who surmounts incredible obstacles – but then, there, I’m doing it again – implying in my flip description that I’m somehow too adult and worldly to fall for this narrative. (And, I did it again.) I did fall for this narrative, hard, and I’m going to have to just suck it up and soldier on. 

I read this book in a swoon, compulsively. It was the kind of reading experience where I totally screwed myself by reading far into the the night, nervously checking the clock thinking “damn” as 1:15 flew by, then 2:45, knowing full well that kids would be up and jumping on me in six hours, five hours, just put the book down and sleep! If you could somehow concentrate and aerosolize this feeling, you would find me down by the railroad tracks, under a bridge, huffing powdered books out of bag, their glitter mixing with my drool and b.o. 

And here’s where the digression comes in. So, here, in my city, at some point in the last five years, it became a thing for the homeless to stand at the entrances of freeways and other major roads holding signs. They tend to say things like “wounded veteran” and “trying to get home” and “God bless.” In my driving about, I’ve seen that the cardboard signs lay folded in the shrubbery, waiting for the next person to come along, unfold, and stand on the edge of the frontage road. There’s one on 54th and Nicollet that reads “absolute desperation.” At first this set me giggling, because I’m an asshole, but then it got me thinking. This is a true statement, and terrifying all the more because the sentiment is interchangeable; something that can written on a piece of cardboard and reused by any person standing on that corner. Not that I need to justify this, necessarily, but I live in a pretty extreme climate, and the people standing on these corners are not doing this for kicks, but because it’s cold and they’re hungry or jonesing for something or whatever, and this seemed like the best option available. The best option. Yikes. 

I’ve had a long running joke with my husband about how we all live in bubbles of like-minded people, the kind of people with whom you argue vehemently about the nuances about how you all totally agree. We sort ourselves into the blindness of our own comfort, and I don’t mean this just in the happy, healthy, developed world sense of comfort that I was born into. We take it farther, drawing bright red lines down the political aisle and using those lines to determine whom we respect and where we live. It’s not a new thing, certainly, but in early new millennium America, I’m just floored by the widening gaps in our political discourse and how they are made manifest in the very real physical embodiment of the completeness of the gerrymander and the ease we all acquiesce to that reality. Taken as a whole, the country is awash in purple, but as you look from locality to locality, they flame bright blue or bright red as we sort ourselves into two Americas that exist in the comfort of local smugness balanced against that old, hoary American favorite, massive paranoia about what the other half is doing. This book takes the bubbles of our acquaintance and schematizes them into a distopian hell-hole. 

It’s a post-American America, with the center, the Capitol, ruling 12 districts that each supply their different products: electronics, coal, agricultural goods, etc. Maybe 75 years before, there had been a civil war, a rebellion by the districts ending in vigorous and complete quashing. As a reminder of the sin of rebellion, every year the Capitol chooses 2 children from each district, between the ages of 12 and 18, to fight in the Hunger Games. They fight to the death, until there is one kid standing. The whole event is, of course, televised. (I know that there has been some criticism that this plot has been used before, but this is sheer bone-headed stupidity. So what if Ice-T did it first?) This is not an economic/political system that makes a ton of sense, if you look at it too closely, but that’s not the point, or it is the point exactly. Collins takes our American disconnects and makes them manifest, relocates the people with cardboard signs reading “absolute desperation” from the arteries of our Interstate system and concentrates them into concrete ghettos of poverty and subjugation. 



And now for my love of the protagonist. I can see why this happens, because writers have to live with the people they create, but so often a writer’s love of the character strips them of moral ambiguity, even while that ambiguity nips at their heels. This may be even more true for YA lit, with things like Bella Swan’s clumsiness standing in for an actual character flaw, even while Bella herself wallows in self-centered satisfaction at her flattened aspect to everyone around her but Edward. (Yup, gotta get in the Twilight dig.) Katniss is competent and clueless and savage, a reminder to us old folks that sometimes the young have worlds of understanding that isn’t based on experience, but on character. Or it is based on experience, but simply because they have less of it, doesn’t make it something you can measure using the yardstick of duration. 

I was nailed to the floor when Katniss made her first kill in the arena and doesn’t have a what-have-I-done? melt-down, but is instead gratified by a horrible act that can never really compensate for the horrible acts enacted by the events preceding. We, as readers, are gratified, because it’s what we want, some good Old Testament justice that spills a little blood to try to even the odds in a seriously unjust system. The writerly propensity to fig-leaf this murderous satisfaction with an immediate “Oh no! I’m so bad for loving this” is absent. This is not to say that Collins sees these actions as having no moral, personal impact – Katniss’s mentor, who also survived the Hunger Games, is a constant, alcoholic reminder of how something like this might mess a brother up good. 

There are plenty of themes I hate with a passion – say, “crazy makes you deep” for example – but one that’s pretty high on the list is “you, reader, are a voyeur, and I, the author, will dish out a bunch of sick shit and blame it on you.” This is generally some lazy, lazy stuff; the kind of stuff used to plug the holes in the leaking boat of D-grade action films and misogynist bullpucky. This book could be that, easily, in less adept hands. But I’m still not through worrying about my intense reading pleasure in relation with a story that makes children fight to the death. No, of course the children aren’t real, but to mangle a quote, they are living in imaginary gardens with real toads in them. 

It makes me think of the short story by Ursula K. Le Guin called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas In the story, Le Guin conjures a utopia whose perfection is tied, in some undefined yet concrete way, on treating on single child with the most unbelievable cruelty – never touched, never allowed to see the sun, nothing. Children, upon reaching the age of 16, are brought to see this child, as the basis for their adulthood. Most see and stay, but some simply walk away. I read this, and it felt kind of bloodless and psychomythic. Like, okay, whatever, fictional world. It felt like one of those indictments of people who are not abjectly impoverished that says, “No one should party while other people are suffering” I thought she was valorizing the walking away. Some time later, I freaked out, because I felt like I’d missed her point entirely. We all live in a society, in societies, where, right now, there are people living in the most shit-hole injustice, untouched, hungry, brutalized. I think probably the brutalized child is a fact of all societies, like it or not. Walking away doesn’t make you better, it just makes you end up in another society with a different kind of kid in the basement. And if you’re the child, walking away simply isn’t an option. 

Main Street: 100 Year Old Satire Still Makes Me Die

Wow. Main Streetkind of kicked the tar out of me, something that I did not expect even halfway through my read. I’ve been sputtering and wailing around the house since I finished a couple of days ago, trying to get my thoughts in order. I should have seen this coming for a thousand reasons, but probably the biggest reason is that this is a satire about my own people, and it’s gotten me where I live. It’s also gotten me, which is maybe the worst thing about it. Good satire doesn’t play nice. It eats babies and butchers the sacred cows, and this is some of the best satire I’ve ever had the discomfort to read. 

The narrative starts cheerfully, with Carol, or protagonist, marrying a small town doctor, a one Mr. Kennicott, and stumbling from St Paul into the inbred, gossipy community of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Lewis is quick-witted and dry, and every page seems to have some sort of wry observation about America and its people, about the sexes, about education. On Mrs. Bogart, the most virulent of the town gossips:

She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown.  


Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in any chicken yard a number of old hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance.

Ha! I mean, calling gossips hens is maybe nothing new, but the way he takes it to this extreme conclusion, the capital letters – this is all funny to me. The beginning is thickly adjectival; some sections only long descriptions of place with bending semi-colons between them; a sort of Epic catalog of the armaments of small town. I laughed along with it, because he’s funny, just objectively, but then also because I was substituting the name Sauk Centre – where Lewis is from – for Gopher Prairie, pretending that what happens in Gopher Prairie stays in Gopher Prairie, willfully ignoring that this is not some grudge-match between Lewis and his home town, but a smarter, more encompassing indictment of whatever was passing for the “real America” of his day. 

I’m going to tell several hundred off-topic stories here, so gird your loins, folks. I hale from the proud state of Minnesota, and my folks were heavy into Sinclair Lewis when I was growing up. So much so that we visited Sauk Centre, Minnesota multiple times as a child, because Sauk Centre was Lewis’s hometown and the model for the satirical town of Gopher Prairie in Main Street. I’ve gone to his grave, walked through his house, and know all kinds of random trivia about him. Mum has the bed he owned when he lived in Duluth. (Duluth, MN being another town he took apart in his novel Babbitt. Also, hey, did you know that the name babbitt – from the eponymous character of Lewis’s book – became a common noun, meaning a self-satisfied middle-class materialist? Or babbittry, which may be an even better word, which refers to this kind of person’s actions? You didn’t? Philistine.) During the last half of my read, I was staying with my Grandma, who came from a town much like Gopher Prairie. “Oh, you’re reading that?” she said, with one of her enigmatic laughs. “I re-read Babbitt last year.” I asked her what she thought. “Yep, I knew a lot of people like him,” was her only reply. I tried to get more out of her, but she just shook her head. I don’t know if this kind of terseness means anything to other people, but coming from Grandma, it spoke volumes to me.

All this Lewis mania happened when I was very young though, and part of the fun of reading this book has been pestering my folks for stories about Lewis and Sauk Centre and all the weird stuff they know about him, and correcting my fuzzy drifting memories of that time. I remember standing in the museum – or maybe the hotel? – looking at the drawings local school children had done of his books, and feeling weird about the pictures for Arrowsmith that depicted an anvil and some arrows. That can’t be right. It amuses the crap out of me that these kids lauded the Famous Native Son of Sauk Centre, Minnesota with absolute ignorance. I think Lewis would be pleased, in a perverse way. When his brother went to bury the urn containing Red’s remains – Lewis was called Red by his friends – in an act of great satire if it were done by a character – his brother balked at burying the urn itself. Maybe you could use it again or something? Too nice to bury, anyhow. It was a calm, windless day, the kind of deep cold, high pressure system that sits still and echoing over Minnesota in the dead of winter. His brother decided to dump the ashes, and at the moment he did, the wind picked up out of nowhere and scattered Red all over the graveyard. It got so cold that night, that many of the windows up and down Main Street cracked. The Palmer House, where Lewis worked as a youth, is haunted, or so they say – though not by Lewis – and when I stayed there as a kid, it sparkled with drama and danger. 

I have no idea why I’m telling all these Middlewestern Gothic tales, because Main Street is not Gothic, but parts of it were scary as shit, for me. Published 90 years ago, this satire nails the ever-loving crap out of so much of American culture, culture that has remained disturbingly similar for nearly 100 years. So, yeah, the parts about semi-English speaking Scandinavian/German rurals maybe would only work for someone whose ancestors were exactly that, but Lewis’s portrait of emerging (sub)urban plutocrats and their petty, depressing babbittry (see what I did there?) was both gleefully accurate and, well, horrifyingly accurate. The satire is also deft because it’s aimed in two directions: at his main character, a somewhat flighty reform-minded housewife, and at the town she so ineffectually seeks to reform. 

Much of this book reminds me of Austen, but I don’t want to say that too loudly lest people misunderstand. Especially at the beginning, it is very domestic, and centers on the social lives of a very large cast of characters. Carol is an Emma Woodhouse of sorts, though more a middle-class version, if such a thing is possible (and I think it is.) There’s lots of social burlesque and cringe-inducing missteps both by Carol, and by everyone around her. Carol’s also not far from Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey (maybe my jump to Gothic wasn’t so far off) in that she says incredibly revolutionary things, really critical things, and no one much pays her mind because she’s just some girl. Lewis also has an incredibly touching sensitivity to women’s experience, one that I didn’t expect from a male writer of this era. An argument with her husband:

“Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn’t like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff, skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband’s bushy face, the constant battle, and the worship of spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, ‘But it can’t all be wrong!’ and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world that produces a Percy Breshnahan [a famous Son of Gopher Prairie] and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we’ll continue in barbarism as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are.” 


“You’re a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I’d like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You’d drop your theories so darn quick! I’m not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They’re rotten. Only I’m sensible.”  


He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had a neophyte’s shock of discover that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answers when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.

This all goes down mid-book, and I was still rah-rah-ing and sighing along with Carol, even as Lewis skewered her as the parlor radical, the armchair revolutionary, comfortable, beholden to the system, part of the system, inextricable, hypocritical. Ha ha! Look at Carol make an ass of herself in front of a bunch of asses! Ha ha! Carol is treated badly, shunned, brought into line by the gossiping cruelty, but she’s insulated and made ineffectual by her money, her status. She’s the doctor’s wife. Her ideas are eccentricities and not threats. 

Then the hammer drops. There are two episodes in the middle half of the book – spoilers ahead, although I will try to be as non-specific as possible – that clove me in two, and dealt with how terrible this bourgeois decorum can be. One was about the town Socialist, a personable logger-tinkerer, who blows into and out of town through the first part of the book. (I know this guy; I work with him. Like Carol, I’ve always been fond of how outside society my colleague is, how modular his life. He can pick up and go, while the rest of us are bolted down.) The plutocrats like scoring points off of The Red Swede, but he’s cheerfully impervious. But then he settles down into a really wonderful marriage to Carol’s maid, and Carol defies the town in continuing to associate with the maid, and him, even though she mostly does it on the sly. Then, oh God….I kind of don’t want to talk about it. I’ll just say that however bad it gets, it can get logarithmically worse when people demand obeisances for kindnesses that should be a requirement if you want to call yourself human. And then punish you for calling them out. God help my friend if he ever has anything to lose. 

Then a girl goes to a dance with Cy Bogart, Widow Bogart’s son, narrowly avoids being raped, and is run out of town for her trouble. Cy brags and blames, and gets in good with the corner-chatting men of the town. Widow Bogart goes screaming to the school board. Carol tries her hardest to help the girl, and everyone knows that Widow Bogart is a sanctimonious bitch, and that Cy is trouble, but it doesn’t matter. The girl is ruined. She leaves under a cloud. 

Her letter to Carol, a little later:

…& of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers’ agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don’t know what I will do. Don’t seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that’s in love with me but he’s so stupid that he makes me scream.”

It’s so awful it makes me die. It’s more awful because I identify with Carol, possibly in a way that Lewis never intended. I’m a Midwestern housewife type. I am comfortably Liberal, while languishing in a life that is incredibly conservative: marriage, monogamy, children, mortgage, &c &c. It’s real nice of me to espouse my little ideas over coffeecake, but it doesn’t actually get anything done, and it sure doesn’t undo all the damage done by the Widow Bogarts of the world, and their sons. Lewis’s portrait of Carol is affectionate, more affectionate than his portrait of the town of Gopher Prairie, but it’s still like hugging one of those wire mommies in that horrible experiment. 

I don’t know that I can go on with this review, because I don’t want to fall into a bunch of self-pity and hand-wringing. Lewis has already satirized that, so it would be mawkish and redundant. Satire is depressing, when it’s done well, because it’s true. It’s even more depressing when a satire from a century ago can feel fresh and current. I’m definitely going to read more Lewis, but not until I heal up a bit.

As side note: Sinclair Lewis, people, not Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a socialist indictment of the treatment of labor in America, which has been somewhat mistakenly remembered as a gross-out about meat packing*; Sinclair Lewis was a satirist who was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’ve had to make this distinction too many times when I told people I was reading this book.

*I mean, it is a gross out about meat-packing, but I think Upton was trying more to galvanize people about the treatment of people. 

Wifey: Not Jumping but Hanging

Not jumping but hanging. 

First off, I’d like to note that Wifey was chosen as a group read for a romance-reading group. This is seriously funny-sad, in retrospect, because I think this novel is the anti-romance. Which is not to say it doesn’t have some commonalities with the romance novel: female protagonist, concerned primarily with sex and relationships, trappings of consumerism and status. This book also shares a commonality of usage with romance in that many, many people about my age stole this from their mothers at an impressionable age so’iz they could read the sex bits over and over. Having read this as an adult, I find this somewhat hysterical, because it is possibly the least romantic book to be classed as such. If a romance novel is primarily an act of wish-fulfillment, where love conquers all and sex is cauterized through marriage, then this succeeds in only one of these things. And I can tell you it’s not the love bit.

I have a pretty severe allergy to this time period in American fiction, and I realize a bit of this is learned and a bit of it is just general cultural anxiety. Writing from the sexual revolution can’t work for me, generationally, because things that are couched as stunning revelations – women feel desire – read like cliché. Of course we do! Durr. Then there’s a boomer friend of mine likes to lean in and make jokes about that time period, in this upsetting way, because he’s the father of a friend of mine, and shouldn’t be talking about sex to me: the sexual revolution was all about getting into the pants of those not inclined. Hey baby, why do you have to be so square? I take his point: sometimes people equate free love with the sexual revolution, when I think that’s super reductive, but that equation is one that has a long history, and I think this book cuts a slash though that equals sign. The parts of the sexual revolution that I love have to do with the interrogation of gender roles and social expectations, and I think this book hinges on the equation of sex with liberation, and shows how hollow that idea can be when there isn’t a corresponding change in assumptions. There’s all kinds of social panic in this book: gay panic – apparently having a woman touch a man’s nipples makes him gay; racial panic – there are several enlightening conversations about what constitutes a “good” minority, red-lining, white flight, etc; gender panic – having sex with a woman on top makes her a “women’s libber” (god, I haven’t heard that term in a dog’s age). Sandy’s miserable in her roles a housewife and mother, and sleeping around may put those roles into crisis, but it doesn’t make those roles go away.

I recently read The Crying of Lot 49which was written roughly ten years before this, at the other end of the country and at the very beginning of the sexual revolution that is about to crash into the Jewish New Jersey suburbs in Wifey. I think that Oedipa from Lot 49 and Sandy from Wifey have strains of the same DNA in their blood. I’m feeling a little stupid comparing Pynchon to Blume here, but seriously. Oedipa is a useless housewife, as is Sandy; despite their transgressions, both are incredibly socially conservative; they both go on their little journeys of sex and discovery, and both novels fall completely apart, in the end, although one is much more personal a failure than the other. There’s other commonalities too – I think that the Nazi shrink in Lot 49 has something in common in creepiness with the gynecologist brother-in-law in Wifey, both of them trying to enact their institutional fuckery on the principles of these books. (I’m not using the term Nazi metaphorically here, although Pynchon might be. Dr. Hilarious was a bona fide Nazi doctor.) The difference may be that Pynchon treats his Oedipa with disdain & misunderstanding, in a gendered, satire kind of way – I’m pretty sure the only thing that makes Oedipa a woman is that her heels clack – Blume treats her protagonist with the pointed cruelty of understanding. Sandy does not just have clacking heels, she has an itchy vagina which she scratches to bleeding. Sorry, this is gross, but it’s the vagina-that-shall-not-be-named, the spooky specter of female libido.

There’s a moment in Lot 49 when Oedipa confronts what to any good social conservative is the inevitable horror of societal sexual permissiveness when she watches a mother and son tongue-kiss their farewells in a bus station – they’ve been using the evil, subterranean postal system to telegraph their transgressive love – and Oedipa falls into a dream-swoon, unsure if this real or imaginary. If it is acceptable to cross one line, then why not another? But Oedipa is mostly a satirical creature and Pynchon’s poking fun at her perceptions – I think it’s no accident that she ends up floating around Berkley or wherever it is running into gays and hobos and Vietnam veterans after she has her extramarital affair, because it’s almost like Pynchon is rubbing her nose in how she takes one part of the social movements going on by giving herself a pass to have an affair, and discarding the rest. The sexual revolution had as much to do with Stonewall or custodial rights or whatever as it has to do with giving already privileged people the permission to do what they want, which they would do anyway. When she finally returns to her husband, he’s lost in drug-perceptions, and the pinwheeling satire of 49 draws to its unfinished conclusion.

But Oedipa is a satirical creature and Sandy is not; Sandy has an inner life much more fully realized than Oedipa. Pynchon comes to judgment on Oedipa, and Blume does not. While there are elements of social satire in Wifey, it’s not satire, a frustrating muddle of realism and satire, of burlesque and social commentary. It’s aggressively straightforward, almost to a strange degree. I’ve read me lots of genres, and there’s usually a moment, even in the most prosaic of fictions, when the writer tries some writerly zig-zag, just to make sure you’re paying attention. I don’t feel like that ever happened here, and it makes me think about the female diarist in Possessionwho never writes what she means, and that not writing it is an act of subversion. I’m groping, again, as I have been in all of this review, because I feel like a definitive reading of this book is severely impossible. But as I’ve found in reading this women’s fiction in the group, I take Sandy a lot more personally than I do Oedipa, which is sometimes a mistake. If I’d written this review the minute I finished reading, it would have been one-star outrage – I would have read myself, as a wife & mother, into Sandy, and I would have taken personally the outrages committed and perpetrated by Sandy. I never had that reaction to Oedipa, because she’s not really a woman, and I’m less sensitive to what I perceive as sexist twaddle coming from men, rightly or wrongly.

Blume writes a portrait, a character, and refuses to tell you how to read it, which is absolutely the strangest thing ever. I held off reading the intro until after I read the book, and that fucked me up in all kinds of ways. Blume wrote this after she left her husband in the 70s, and Sandy makes all the choices that Blume did not: to stay by her husband, to hide in her Jewish, suburban enclave, and fuck, I don’t know what. I hate reading books through autobiography. (I have almost zero interest in the lives of writers, maybe because I’ve been tainted by the New Criticism of my mother, who is my internalized reader, my readerly super-ego.) The subversion in the writing is the lack of gloss, in the lack of artistry. Here it is, she says, think what you will. Blume might have written Sandy as an elegy to the choices she never made, because there was a moment there, somewhere, where she could have become Sandy, and she understands and empathizes. Maybe not. There are good arguments against the polemic novel, one that tells you what to think and why, but this is anti-polemic, letting you twist wondering why choices were made and conclusions come to.

Here come the spoilers.

When Sandy and her husband come to their agreement, and choose to remain in this horrid, soul-killing marriage, I died. In a year, Sandy will kill herself too, inevitably, awfully. My husband and I screamed out this conclusion: why does it have to end like this? A shared bed is a horrible capitulation – this is not a happy choice. This may be me bringing too much literary reading to my reading, but I was horrified by Sandy’s offer to shave her puss so that her husband could endure it. I think of all the literary hair: Ruskin freaking at his wife’s pubes, Humbert Humbert and his smooth girl, the hard, alabaster Edward, J. Alfred Prufrock noting the hair on the arms of the women coming and going, and on and on. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, because I do not have a woman to hem them. Maybe I’ve just articulated one of those insane personal pet theories, but hair and its metaphorical stand-in for real sexuality, for libido, for the deeply anti-social nature of love seems to be a running thread not just in fiction but in life. Sandy will hem her husband’s trousers, and hem her cunt, and I hate that it comes to that. I hate that I just said “cunt”, like her husband did to Sandy when he found out about the affair. I hate all things that seem like choices but are not, or are choices but the wrong ones.

Another component of the romance novel is one of the exceptionalism of its principles: a love that knows no bounds, love that turns transgression into acceptance, the kind of love that turns someone as soulless & inconsequential as Bella Swan into the heroine of a grand plot. It is the inner life turned out, made manifest in the men who can see the exceptional nature of the protagonist. Sandy is not exceptional: not smart, not talented, not healthy or spunky or robust. But she is character with the only reality, and her rich fantasy life is almost a commentary on the dangers of mistaking wish-fulfillment narratives of love & romance with hard realities. If this were a romance, her affair with Shep would have concluded with their happy marriage and some more babies. But Shep is just some schmuck, like her husband, and wishing for happiness, hoping that love will magic away her obstacles for happiness continues to put the agents to her happiness in other people. As crushed as I was by her conclusion, for her to stay by her horrible shit of a husband after he smacks her and calls her a cunt, I can’t imagine her making the choice to run away and find a less inconsequential life. This story interrogates the idea that romantic love can change your life, and lays it bare. Sandy should, by all rights, chuck this dreary shit and strike out on her own, but she’s been bound by a narrative of domestic harmony and consumerist comfort that makes such a choice impossible. In short, she’s swallowed the barb that’s in a lot of women’s fiction: that you cannot do this on your own. Love will set you free, but if there is no love to be had, then you remain in your cage, and she does. I hate her choice. I think it will kill her in the end, but I appreciate Blume’s lack of judgment & her compassionate portrait of Sandy. Sandy is the road most traveled. May we all look on her and despair.

We Shall Not Be Going to the Lighthouse Today

I saw five lighthouses today, and at each one, I told my children that “We shall not be going to the lighthouse today”, and every single time, they almost started crying. I’ve been laughing about this, in an extremely immature fashion, but I’m also sad about how I can’t seem to stop joking about this thing that hurts them, even if it’s transitory and easily remedied by the fact of real lighthouses blow over by a clear, cold wind. Ah.

—–

We’re walking back on the lakewall and I meet Mum with her dogs. The boy is running ahead, his head full of the lake and its tidepools and wind. The girl and my husband are lagging, her short legs in almost comic contrast with his long swinging stride. Mum and I talk about the wind, which is palpable and cold. It pushes, insistent, but with an insistence that is less gentle than the similarly palpable sun. We talk of our separate walks: she to the point, we to the lighthouse.

The girl is mad for the lighthouse. She has demanded that we return this morning, despite our carefully worded choice to her: the lighthouse or the island. She chose the island, but returning by the lakewall she saw it again. We give in, and go, but I say it again, the horrible joke, the unfunny untruth, “We shall not be going to the lighthouse today.” She doesn’t hear me; she is far ahead, running, and I shout her back to hold my hand. The narrowness of the wall, her short legs, the insistent wind. I imagine the cold of the water, how horrible it would be to jump down and fish her out. No need to think of this. Her hand is small and warms my palm.

I don’t know how I work this into conversation with Mum on the lakewall on the way back. There’s a conversation before this about the dogs, their age. “To the Lighthousetakes place on the Hebrides, you know. I’m assuming Skye; the outer ones are too remote.” She and I have been to Skye, and the Uists ten years ago, no almost fifteen, the two of us in a car going from London where I’d spent a semester. Fifty miles from Hadrian’s wall, I, the map reader because I couldn’t drive on the wrong side, I saw a little triangle on the map that read “Carrawburgh, Temple of Mithras,” and began repeating this phrase at every opportunity, in the boomingest voice my lungs could muster.

We went. How could we not? It was Carrawburgh, Temple of Mithras. There was a small gravel car park, and a fence with a cattle grate, and cattle on the other side. In the car park was a German couple in a small car, having a fight. It ended with him stalking off to the ruins and her steaming in the car. We walked around the ruins, although the word “ruins” implies it was something other than a stone square on the ground with the roughest rock hint of an altar. Roman soldiers sacrificed bulls here, bathed in their blood, fortified themselves against the blue-streaked bodies of the Picts just over the wall. Now it was a stone page left carelessly in the grass. We read what we can.

On South Uist, the nearest of the outer Hebrides, it was just past mid-summer, and the sun was nearly constant, as close as we were to the arctic circle. The wind was not insistent, but demanding. The wind was cold and salty, and the land rose and fell with the tides. The sea continues to surprise me when I’m near it, raised as I was with a lake, The Lake, the Lake Superior, which crashes and gurgles like a sea, which kills and rages, but doesn’t breathe or slop. The sea never stills to glass. Archaeologists were excavating the home of Flora MacDonald, who housed Bonny Prince Charlie on his failed, bloody foray into Scotland. I wore everything I owned and the wind still poked its cold fingers through the weave of my clothes. The Ramsay’s house is somewhere just around the corner now, a ghost house, broken slowly by the wind, by the sea air. It lays like a page on the ground, but uncleared by archaeologists, so that the stone sleeps beneath earth and the harsh moss & winking heather. Keep the doors closed and the windows open.

The night before we’d sat around in the small trailer and talked about The Lighthouse. That afternoon I put down the cross stitch I only seem to work on in the car and read the first section. I tell Mum that I didn’t really get it as a freshman, when I read this first. Back at 19, I re-read the first six pages several times, because I simply couldn’t believe that I’d decided James was the protagonist, and then it turns out there is no protagonist, or all are protagonists. The society is the protagonist, the family, maybe. But not the term “society” that implies detachment, sociology, an idea of order as seen from above. But this time, the stream of consciousness felt easy, unforced, intuitive. I had invited Mum to join the group read when it started, but she talks now about how she couldn’t revisit this sadness, how she wept at this book when she read it in grad school. My husband asks why it’s so sad and I can see my mother’s eyes become reflective when she talks of the loss of Mrs. Ramsey. That she could die! That she could live and then die!

I’m thinking of Grandma Fran suddenly, my mother’s mother, who died, and her loss is a great lake of still, saltless water somewhere under my lungs that makes it hard to speak. Maybe Mum is thinking of her too, but she has her own lake, and it goes unmentioned. We talk about Joyce, and Ulysses, how Modernism often relies too heavily on the Classical mythology in ways that make it opaque to me. I express how surprised I was that the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses was the same person as the one in Portrait of the Artist, how one captured something about my adolescence, and the other was kind of a jerk. I say that I didn’t understand the politics in Ulysses because I’m a bad student of history. Like, who is Parnell?

Mum leans forward. “But what about the dinner table fight about Parnell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?” Oh, but I get that entirely! The emotional reality of the argument wasn’t about politics at all, and I saw myself blinking through Stephen’s eyes at the domestic rage that is the sister of the political. Here is where we can talk about Grandma, about her Mum, who is the same woman, but in parallax. We talk about Grandma Fran and her sister, devout Old World Catholics both in their different ways, and how Grandma loved to take big swings at the Pope at the dinner table that were designed to connect with Aunt Helen’s devotion. The men would leave the table as quick as they could. One cannot catalog the history of a family like the dates and battles of history; it will not run linearly. The way Woolf breaks our consciousness into separate, connected, ruptured understandings that flow from one eye to the other – this is the web of my mind.

Earlier the woman at the coffee shop told me there was a nesting killdeer, which is a shore-bird with the long, funny legs and rock-like plumage, living right near the start of the lakewall that leads to the lighthouse. To protect their nests they fake a broken wing, dragging it lamely on the ground, to lure the predator away. I’ve forgotten to look for her on our way out, our way in. Her eggs are there, somewhere, living rocks in with the more placid ones. Why do I want to find her and provoke her automatic response? Maybe because she shields her babies with a brokenness I understand, until the predator moves far enough away and she flies. She flies. 

The Ravishing of Being Really French

Well, this review turned out to be a whole helluva lot harder to write than I thought when I was snorting my way through Ravishing of Lol Stein. This was chosen as a group read for a romance reading group, out of list of capital-L Literature books that are read primarily for their sexual content, stuff like The Story of O and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And my experience ended up being similar to my read of Wifey, another book read primarily for its sexual content, but hoo boy, not because either is romantic in any way. But are stories of unfulfilled housewives, both were unpleasant for me to read, both were chilly and distant, shot through with voyeurism and infidelities of all kinds, and both ended up being much more interesting to consider than to read. 

I’ve got a thing for the housewife in literature, I admit. I notice her and watch her, the way she is constructed and commented on. She’s not a component of any romance I can think of, almost the anti-romance in her bones: the foregone conclusion, the morality tale, the warning. (Though maybe remarriage comedies come close – but no, that’s not quite right.) She is inert and motionless, not part of the decisive world of love, but its frusty, decaying aftermath. No romance starts with a housewife, though it may end with one in the oblique. (And, quick aside – this is interesting too. I don’t know the truth of this, but the housewife is the imagined reader of romance novel, who we allude to when we talk about who consumes wish-fulfillment exercises about the domestic. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think some of the attacks on Twimoms are ad hominem – Twilight is bad, because the readership is bad. You ladies should grow up.) 

It’s true that I find her fascinating because if you squint right, I am a housewife. No, yes, of course, I work, and don’t feel defined exclusively by my husband or my family, but the work of child-rearing and house-keeping is still a major component of my personality at this point in my life. I regularly self-define myself as a housewife though, often disingenuously, just because I know it pisses my friends and husband off. No, you’re not a housewife, they eyeroll, you’re smarter than that. Which is the thing to me, ultimately. An almost inextricable part of the definition of housewife is her passivity and lack of intellectual life; hers is an emotional life, protecting the hearth fires so that men, and later (boy) children, can venture out into the important and active world and do important and active things. She looks within so others can act without. She is the font of compassion like Mrs. Ramsay from To The Lighthouse, telling James his bedtime stories so that Mr. Ramsay can contemplate the movement from P to Q. And ultimately, she has no self. She is a role cut out from society and watched like a kettle. Maybe watching will keep it from boiling. 

Which is the thing with this novel. This book takes on all of the voyeurism inherent in the housewife narrative – the neighbors watching, the husband watching, the male gazing – and makes it manifest, everyone peeping out from their houses, into windows, imagining observers and observing observers and mirror mirror mirror memory observation mirror mirror. As an intellectual or literary exercise, this book is some bang up stuff. The narrator reads like a man gossiping about himself, and the unsettling shifts to quoted narratives, between the first and third person, between the felt self and observed self were artfully done. The distance this creates, though intentional, is yawning and chilly. There is so much art, there is very little life. 

Interesting, I think to myself, how often the narrative of the housewife hinges on voyeurism. Sandy, in Wifey, watching a masturbating motorcyclist watching her window in the first scenes; Carol, from Main Street, the most squirmingly accurate portrayal of a housewife to me, fighting the blind-holding gossips; and the most tactile voyeur of them all, Humbert Humbert, watching like a pov slasher killer Delores Haze and her immortal daughter, Lolita, from inside the house, like the murderer he was. I felt the fingerprints of Lolita all over this story, down to Lola’s own name. But there’s other things as well: the road trip, the beach where Lol’s insanity is born mirroring Humbert’s beach side dalliances that he (partially, lyingly) blames for his derangement, the endless descriptions of Lol’s slenderness, the repeated phrase that she is a “grown-up schoolgirl”. Lol is a collapsed character, melding both Delores Haze and her daughter Lolita, with annihilating results. There is no center to hold here, no self beyond the observed one, no housewife but the one seen from without. And, speaking from the inside, maybe that’s the only place where one can see her, can see me. I, we housewives exist in observation. Without it, we are only ourselves, and that is nothing at all. 

Hot damn, I have been infected by all this glacial unknowing. Because hear this: I laughed through this book. There’s a lot here that feels stupid and dated, calculated, deliberately unreal. The narrator regularly refers to himself in the third person: Jack Hold did this; Jack Hold did that. I had this annoying friend who would refer to himself as Hershel Walker, who I think was a football player for the Vikings, because Hershel Walker did that all the time. Hershel Walker threw the game. Hershel Walker gives 110%. Hershel Walker does not use the first person because Hershel Walker is too important for that. So when Jack does it, I laugh. Lol Stein’s name unfortunately reads to me as LOL Stein, which is an accident of history, I know. Lol! Then there is the dialogue, which is art film wankery up the ass all day. There is no person on earth who talks like this, let alone a gaggle of them speaking past each other. I wanted to shake them all, shake them until their necks snapped, pour blood on the dining room table, scream. Bunch of fucking phonies. 

I also thought of the Gothic novel, that panic of the domestic, the castle rotting from within by secrets kept and marshaled by women even if they are perpetrated by men. These books of the housewife write the details of their enclosures as closely as they do the housewives themselves; the housewife as landscape; the housewife as nature documentary. There’s an epic catalog of her houses in literature: Mrs. Ramsay’s closed doors and open windows, Mrs. Haze’s petty bourgeois taste, Carol’s failed parties in a Chinese theme, Mrs. Dalloway’s narrow bed and her famous flowers, Sandy’s chart documenting the shits of her dog. (I’m leaving off Oedipa Maas, because I’m not sure she’s a woman.) Maybe we will learn something from her furniture, from her gardens, but then it turns out the gardens and draperies are for show, just like everything else. They are cultivated for observation. Look, look, look. Fuck, I don’t know. This book has defeated me with its distance, all this talk of love by people who are liars. Liars! Almost nothing said by anyone about any feeling at all made sense to me. Aliens. 

So, yeah, I’m glad I read it, but I’m equally happy to be done with it. Oh, and far as sex writing goes, this is a cold affair, the erotic of the oblique, and very little of it stirred me. There were a few scenes with Lol sleeping in a rye field below the hotel window where her friends were enacting their dubious love affair that were beautiful, but every time someone kissed someone else, I recoiled. Gross. Maybe you either watch or touch, maybe you look but don’t touch, that old saw about women not being visually oriented in their desires. Maybe not.

An Elegy for New York: Zone One

Maybe it was just a matter of the timing of my read because the tenth anniversary was last week, but I feel like this book was a 9/11 novel. I don’t mean to be reductive – there’s certainly other stuff here – but there’s this thinly morose elegy for New York going on, cut with something less combative than sarcasm and more emotional than irony. I spent the fortnight leading up to 9/11/11 – a stutter of a date – narrowly avoiding public commentary, while committing a series of glancing asides with friends. Where were you? 9/11 in public has been rendered cinematic, that famous long-shot of the towers burning is maybe too restrained for Michael Bay, but it certainly lacks the ashy situated experience of the day, all phone calls and slowly dawning horror. One thing that kept popping up in my conversations of rememory was the almost whispered question – do you remember the people jumping, falling from the towers? Do you remember the reports of the smack of their bodies hitting the ground? Do you remember the footage? It’s gotta be out there somewhere, not that I want to see it again, but it’s been collectively wiped from our retinas, an eye rub that seeks to dislodge the sleep-ash of the nightmare. But it’s been ten years. We’ve stuttered into our new normal, the uneasy and easy everyday of a world walking on. 

 Zone One by Colson Whitehead follows with an intimate third person a character called Mark Spitz. He’s not the Olympian Mark Spitz, his name instead a post-armageddon macabre joke about his relentless averageness. Whitehead tosses off a lot of incisive, tending towards over-wrought descriptions of other characters and places, but his lead is so blank, so lacking in affect that you feel the chill of loss despite the semicoloned literary style. The action of the book takes place over three tight days, but the true incidents are lappingly recounting in flashback, the scum of the blood-tide peeled back layer by dried layer. Much of the supporting cast could dissolve into quirk-fests if it weren’t for constant reminders of the sources of these quirks, the almost laughingly named disorder PASD – Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. PASD when spoken aloud sounds like “past”, a sometimes funny, always awful double entendre. 

Mark Spitz – and this name is never familiarized to Mark, nor do we ever learn his given name – begins the book cleaning out “stragglers” from the titular Zone One, which is a section of Manhattan barricaded from the rest of the island by the reforming government of the US and cleared of the more active skels. (This set-up is not dissimilar to the set-up for 28 Weeks Later, though the colonial and family psychodrama aspects are much more understated.) The zombies are Romerian (Romeroian? Both of these are ugly adjectives; I apologize) – shambling, biting, unintelligent and relentless – but for a small percentage of stragglers – the undead frozen in tableau, unmoving, unblinking. Mark Spitz and his sweeper team work through the grids of this zone building by building, opening the closets, shooting the active skels and casually trying to divine the mysteries of the stragglers. Why here, bent over a copy machine? Why in a field flying a downed kite? Are these the actions that defined their lives, or just a burp of a recording set to pause at a random frame?

The social rules of survivors recounting the trauma of Last Night are meticulously cataloged by Mark Spitz. There’s the Silhouette, for those to whom no connection was felt; the Anecdote, suitable for large groups and the more long-term of the short-term traveling companions; then there is the Obituary, told only to the intimate, though not without rehearsal. This declension of the narratives of trauma reminded of my fortnight of 9/11 recountings this year. I was getting ready for work when I got a call from my sister in Midtown after the first plane but before the second, and then a gush of extraneous details; a friend tells of the ash beginning to fall on Brooklyn; another relating only the tersest of details. I don’t know if I’m allowed to quote from the bound galley I have, so please know that this may not be in the final draft, but, “At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.” The towers were hit, and then they fell, and where we were at the time is both intimate and immaterial. 

Then there is the New Yorkiness of this book, a resident recounting his mixed irritation and affection for the cityest of American cities, carefully prodding nostalgia that at any moment might stir and bite. And when it does, put it down with a bullet. There’s a lot of that insular provincialism found in any person writing about their hometown – a running gag where Mark Spitz refers to Connecticut, where he spent a bad part of the interregnum, always with a damning adjective: damned Connecticut, hated Connecticut, abhorrent Connecticut; or a one-line dismissal of the Midwest which had me both laughing and bridling. Critically elegiac, the love/hate of the before that did not prepare for the after. Sometimes this doesn’t work, and I found myself boring through a description of the family eatery, its essayish tone slipping to droning, too many meanings, too much memory. But I see your point. 

There’s the stink of the inevitable all over this story, and if you’re paying attention at all, you will know how this three days in Zone One is going to end. This is not a spoiler, but a statistic: 100% of people have died, except for the living, who will likely succumb to statistics just like the rest of history eventually. Despite the zombies, this is not a genre exercise, not really. There are no hat-tips to conventions of the zombie narrative, no attempt to science up the zombies or ruminate on causes. Ten years later, it’s just a done deal, something to recount while picking through the mess, the carrion body of historical fact. Even then, zombies carry with them certain inexorable truths in their rotten bones into this literary landscape. Reflection is a sad, useless business, self-serving in the abstract and distracting in the specific. But reflection is also compulsive and necessary in our human states: silhouette, anecdote or obituary. What does it matter where I was? It simply matters that I was. We pick up and shamble on.

(An ARC of this book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher, but no conditions were put on my review. Fyi.)

Posts from Overshare Planet: The Piper’s Son

Oh my god. This writer.

 The Piper’s Sonis the gentlest, most humane disemboweling I’ve ever experienced. She’s got a knack with a knife, Marchetta, filleting me word by word. She peels me like a snail, and what’s left is the unformed invertebrate mush of my adolescent self. I’ve managed, just barely, to keep from the overshare with my last two Marchetta books, but I can’t do that here. She’s gotten me. She’s gotten my by the throat. 

Once, I walked out of a house during a fight, a bad fight, the kind of fight where even my memory of it is bruised and puffy. He was a friend, and then a lover, a night-and-a-half stand, and I had battered myself bleeding on how indecisive the stand was. I was yelling, and crying, a maelstrom of wild embarrassment. (Oh God, I hate still how bad I felt, and how most of it was my fault.) And then I closed my mouth, and looked at him – I can admit now that he was stricken too, in his own way, helplessly watching his friend go insane – and then I got up, and walked out. He stood on the lawn and watched me drive away. 

It would be overly dramatic to say I never saw him again, but that was more or less the truth of it for years. Years and years. I was a cracked and leaking mess for months, my life caught in a wobble. I’d returned untriumphantly to my hometown after an abortive attempt at college, half-assedly taking classes at the U, living with Mum and my high-school aged sister. He had been my best friend upon my slinking return, staying up too late doing the stupid projects he dreamed up, useless and hilarious projects predicated on a scaffold of inside jokes and too much time and not enough ambition. He liked to drive at night in his parents’ looming station wagon with bench seats. He had an insomniac’s knowledge of the city’s geography, and I’d act as passenger, my legs up on the dash. There are Indian burial mounds in a sleepy neighborhood in St Paul overlooking the highway and then the river, and they are magic in the dark hours. 

So yeah, Tom. I know you, you asshole. I know how I broke my own heart on you. I know other Toms too, the boys vomiting up blood and beer, vomiting up the pain of their fathers who hit them or their mothers, or walked out, and didn’t walk out but wound down so tight that nothing came out again, nothing. Boys who would go out drinking and work shitty jobs and tumble. Boys who played the guitar like dervishes, their fumbling lyrics badly rhyming their attempts at speech. Toms that could cleave you in two with five words, or none at all. 

This one boy, another of my Toms, an arrogant, beautiful dude, explaining the power of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, drunk, to a group of my friends, and it was a moment of awe. They hated him, rightly, because he was a powerful asshole. He was mean to them because he thought it was funny, and much of the time it was. Sometimes it was just mean. The then, holy God, here was this moment, his unalterable self on display in another man’s words.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Where the hell did that come from? This was a guy who played the football pool, and was working from casual alcoholism to the more complete kind. It was not enough that he had this inside him, but it was a close call there for a while. He had a twin bed. Whenever I slept in it, I had the sensation that I was going to fall in my sleep, my hips perched on the edge. I never did. I had resolved not to, and this was one of the few times in my life where resolve actually worked. I was not going through that again, landing on the floor and bruising my metaphorical ass. His brother was an older version of him, same shit-stirring, same laugh, and he threatened me once gently, when we were in a kitchen alone from the rest of the group. What do you think about Tom? He asked. There was a moment. Other than the alcoholism, of course. 

I laughed. Yeah, other than that. You know, he’s an asshole, but I like him. We have a good time. 

Don’t you go breaking his heart, he said. 

I was surprised, him? No offense, but I’m pretty sure I’m nowhere near his heart. He’s safe from me. His brother laughed. Tom was in the next room fighting his brother’s girlfriend for access to the CD player. I was too stupid and young to understand what his brother was saying. Maybe I was the Tom there. Maybe there’s no maybe about it. Good times, bad times, bad timing. 

But this isn’t just about Tom; there’s also his aunt, his friends, his family, all these people struggling on after heartbreaks that have calcified, generations of losses that accumulate and have to be spaded through, disinterred. It’s bold choice to follow a 42-year old pregnant woman as protagonist in your YA novel, bold as grief, bold as receding youth. I feel like sometimes fictions of the post-high school years insulate themselves from other generations. Dad does a walk-on so our hero can resolve his issues. Mom wrings her hands and sends money. But you don’t graduate into a seemless world of your peers, you keep eating at the family table, fighting politics, sending emails. The real world out there, the one everyone has been warning you about, is the same world with crow’s feet and more silence. It’s the same bed you fell out of, and maybe you can sleep on the couch for the rest of your life, or maybe you can’t. 

I’ve said this before, but I am in awe of Marchetta’s dialogue, some of the best I’ve ever read, ever. Character and voice in the same utterance, I’m in awe of her sprawling, almost gossipy plots that keep a slow burn going that makes your eyes burn and sting. Most of all I’m in awe of her compassion, the way she makes me think about my younger self. Mostly I’m ashamed of younger me – she’s an embarrassment and a natural-born idiot. Marchetta makes me cry for her, makes me love her in spite of her faults, because of her faults. It’s an uneasy love, and it wobbles, but when it winds down I’ll spin it again.