|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
Also this issue: It’s (not) a Living Culture Vultures Walter Mosley Where the Wilde Things Are Children’s Books |
|
|
|
|
 |
|||||||||
March 27-April 2, 2003
cover story
Naked in the Promised Land
By Lillian Faderman Houghton Mifflin, 356 pp., $26
Lillian Faderman is best known as a pioneering scholar of lesbian studies, author of such field-defining works as Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, the first-ever history of lesbianism in America. In her scholarship, she excels at excavating fragmentary evidence of romantic love between women and piecing it into a sapphic narrative. In her new memoir, Faderman turns the same quilter's sensibility to her own life, with mixed results.
Lillian's childhood scarcely suggests an academic future. She dreams of rescuing her single, barely sane immigrant mother -- and the rest of her family, trying to escape Hitler's Europe -- by becoming a child movie star. She learns early on to be suspicious of men. Her mother is driven crazy by Moishe, the handsome bachelor who never admits to being Lillian's father, while Lillian spends her youth fending off the repeated advances of seedy men who are drawn to her knockout figure. Enticed by the easy money, she begins posing nude for pinup magazines, graduates to burlesque shows and continually battles the lure of prostitution.
When she finally finds herself as a professor, university administrator, lesbian and mother, we know these revelations ought to feel satisfying, but instead we feel oddly detached from them. Maybe it's because her decisions are tied tightly to a brand of early '70s feminism that feels decidedly dated in this age of gender trouble and sexual fluidity. Perhaps Faderman, so adept at reclaiming juicy bits of women's history and ascribing significance by placing them in a lesbian context, is less accustomed to crafting a compelling story by other means. Whatever the reason, her quilter's needle has sewn a narrative that, though certainly interesting and a must-read for her die-hard fans, falls short of the essential status her scholarship so rightly enjoys.
Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style
By Michelle Lee Broadway, 294 pp., $24.95
Whether you're a label whore or thrift-store aficionado, or even someone who longs to live without wearing names in a heavily branded world, the $200-billion-a-year fashion industry affects us all. First-time author Michelle Lee has written a book that's equal parts pop-culture critique, market report and sociological study -- and, it's funny. Of course, it's funnier when she's breaking down the 10 commandments of fashion victims (No. 9: Thou Shalt Care About Paris Hilton's Gaultier Micro-Mini) than when she's exploring the nuances of what makes a sweatshop a sweatshop, but even that is explored with a light touch.
According to Lee, "fashion is the Pied Piper, and we are its mice." It's impossible to argue, when she examines the strange, ironic twists of fashion -- like, when Chloë Sevigny wears a gray Mickey Mouse sweatshirt to sit in the front row of fashion shows (and looks great doing so), why do other mere mortals start salivating en masse and wonder what they can wear with theirs? Lee also delves into the idea of speed chic, or trends that burn themselves out within a season (that awful knotted poncho is a recent one), and talks with analysts and experts to examine why so many of us have more than we need and yet continue to buy.
Perhaps the most telling part of Fashion Victim is the epilogue, in which Lee notes, albeit briefly, the impact the events of 9/11 have had on the fashion industry. Major retailers headquartered in New York City, like H&M, began reporting major losses in December 2001. Gucci and Vanity Fair (which owns Lee Jeans and The North Face) cut large amounts of their U.S. workforce that same year. Whether this is indicative of larger trends to come or just an immediate response to a severe strike at our economy remains to be seen, but the fact remains that the fashion industry means big bucks and a part of our identity.
A Little Piece of Sky
By Nicole Bailey-Williams Broadway, 161 pp., $9.95
Nicole Bailey-Williams' first novel is delivered via short, sharp vignettes, mostly of painful memories. To say the book's main character, Song Byrd, has had a rough life and does not know love is a major understatement. She's an African American living in a Hispanic neighborhood in North Philadelphia, conceived out of wedlock, abused for most of her childhood and, at least in her own mind, responsible for her mother's murder. To Song, hope is as elusive as that slice of sky she used to gaze at when her mother locked her in the bathroom.
Beautifully lyrical prose sets A Little Piece of Sky far apart from other novels in the genre. Stylistically the book reads like it was written from the point of view of a child, with a simple view of the world, albeit one that usually does her wrong. Since losing her mother has frozen Song's development, we watch her try to get past the trauma as she grows into an adult, but some things keep coming back to haunt her. Other things, like growing up poor, her new friends will never be able to understand.
Of course, Song learns to resolve her issues with her family and her past, and eventually unburdens herself of the guilt and shame she's been carrying around for most of her life, and the sky wholly opens up for her. Bailey-Williams' narrative makes you hold your breath and tiptoe along with Song as she struggles to free herself.
Featherstone
By Kirsty Gunn Houghton Mifflin, 256 pp., $24
In Kirsty Gunn's third novel, the New Zealander shows off her talent for writing breathless mini prose-poems like the following: "Kate found herself feeling heady with it, breathing the sweetness deep into her body and she had no control, it was filling her, dazing her into believing that the entire night could look after her now and keep her." A sentence like this, marked by wordplay that giddily teases out nuances of even the most basic details of emotion and description, is very pretty to see on a page and, in smaller doses, quite engaging to read. What Featherstone reveals is that 250-plus pages of it can grow wearying.
Perhaps the structure of the book can be blamed in part; its story is told via a series of internal monologues, and the similarities between every character's deepest thoughts, even after plot devices/"life experiences" occur, transform each person into a caricatured reflection of his or her most debilitating obsessions. (Those, for the most part, revolve around sex and vanity and that old small-town archetype, the woman who split town to pursue a modeling career.) One could chalk these parallels up to small-town incestuousness, but one could also be spending his or her time reading a book that didn't require an obsession/occupation chart (not included with purchase) to figure out which character was thinking what. Unless the reader wishes to be transported to a small, dreary town in Scotland where weekends last an eternity, the store windows display discounted "dresses next to lawnmowers" and everyone speaks in the dialect known as "run-on," Featherstone is a destination to be avoided.
The Middle Stories
By Sheila Heti McSweeney’s, 144 pp., $15
2 oz. Alice Munro
1 oz. Lydia Davis
1 oz. Aesop
jigger David Lynch
salt to taste
Muddle the stark, beautiful simplicity of Munro and the floating timelessness of Aesop in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add Davis' remarkable eye for the absurd. Throw in a dash of Lynch's bitter, out-of-skew logic. Stir with ice. Coat the rim of a rocks glass with coarse salt. Strain into 23 stories resembling the kind that Eastern European authors used to write in coffeehouses and sell to their local, daily newspapers. Garnish with lemon.
Though The Middle Stories marks Sheila Heti's literary debut, it would be a mistake to call this young Canadian author promising. She delivers like a motherfucker. These stories fly off the pages, pages that you'll turn fast enough to line your fingers with paper cuts. But a little blood's a small sacrifice in exchange for an hour with this collection. And it won't take you more than an hour. It's a little book -- little enough to fit in your pocket, to read on the bus, the toilet -- but like Chairman Mao's little book, it's packed full of ideas.
At her best, in "The Favorite Monkey" and "The Giant" and "What Changed," the language swings between fairy tale and nightmare. Animals talk. With few words, Heti manages to provide the reader, you, with an intuitive understanding about each character. "The Raspberry Bush" opens, "A little old woman who never stopped smiling walked into her kitchen from her garden." Another begins, "Marianne walked to the edge of the pier and looked down and saw her reflection staring back at her. It was an ugly reflection, one she had gotten used to, and it stared up at her dully." There's incredible sophistication lurking in this rhetoric, and an ugly reflection of our world rendered in sweet, sweet harmony.
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About
By Mil Millington Villard, 373 pp., $12.95
Somewhere along the line, people got it into their heads that quarreling is a bad thing, and that people who do it don't like each other so much. Which is all bullshit. Why waste the effort of an argument on someone you don't like?
University IT manager-turned-writer Mil Millington's first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, takes its name from a website (www.milmillington.com) he set up to chronicle the epic and hilarious knock-down-drag-outs he's had with his German-born girlfriend, Margret, over things like whether or not to snap a Kit Kat in half before eating it, where the TV remote is and, of course, who started a particular argument. In the book, Pel Dalton, a, um, university IT staffer, and his, er, German girlfriend, Ursula, live their day-to-day lives as if in a steel cage, pouncing on every opportunity to snip, snipe and push each other's buttons. Millington sets them within a seedy tale wherein Pel's boss mysteriously disappears, leaving him to sort out his business, including dealings with an Asian crime syndicate and management of a university construction project atop a former burial ground, all of which culminates in a smear campaign that threatens to ruin Pel.
It's a perfectly serviceable plot, but it's the undercard to Pel and Ursula's verbal tête-à-têtes which portray, sidesplittingly, a couple that cannot get along, and cannot get along without each other. In an atypical display of earnestness (a classic "he's an asshole, but he's my asshole" exchange), Pel explains to a co-worker critical of his and Ursula's perpetual bickering: "Ursula and I are kept together by irreconcilable differences, OK? Normal couples contain one person who is obsessive and furious about lights being left on and another who is fundamentally incapable of ever turning them off. Ursula and I are just normal only lots more so."
Though there's little effort made by Millington or his publisher to dispel the notion that this is largely autobiographical, Things is so much more than a simple blow-by-blow.
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
By Kate Moses St. Martin’s, 292 pp., $23.95
Kate Moses' novel of Sylvia Plath channels the story of the suicidal poet's final days. "Of" is the operative word, since Plath is more than subject matter -- she is the book's mode and mood. In the same manner Michael Cunningham enshrined Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Moses infuses the very language of Wintering with a brutal and morbid Plath-ian consciousness.
On the verge of divorce, Plath has moved from the country home she shared with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, to a London flat with her two children. Plath is actually hopeful; she is starting a new life, and has just completed a cycle of poems chronicling the relationship's demise, her best work yet.
The real-life irony is, of course, that Plath would end her life anyway; Hughes would edit the collection Ariel after Plath's death, changing the poems' sequence. Here, Moses has titled each of her chapters for a poem in Ariel, sequencing them in the order Plath intended.
To be sure, Moses' literary conceit is almost appalling. The narrative shuttles between the novel's "now-time" of December 1962 and earlier events precipitating the couple's breakup. Strings of overcooked imagery accumulate in every sentence, as Moses catalogs the world from the poet's perspective. Combined, the descriptive mire and the constantly shifting time frame burden an already slow storyline. And yet Moses manages to hone in on Plath's ego, stretched thin between impossible feminine duties, a feeling of abandonment and the compulsion to create. Even an ill-advised dream sequence where Plath is haunted by a ringing telephone has surprising emotional credibility. No easy feat, Wintering has turned Plath's now-stiffened confessional verse into a breathing account of her complicated, troubled experience.
All Over Creation
By Ruth Ozeki Viking, 417 pp., $24.95
Ruth Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats, wove agri-political intrigue and multicultural detachment into a gripping exposé of the hormone-enhanced American beef industry and a telling portrait of the Japanese-American experience. That All Over Creation makes its predecessor feel straightforward by comparison -- what with its myriad politics, family tensions and cultural/religious undercurrents -- is a testament to Ozeki's skill and scope.
This is the tale of Yumi "Yummy" Fuller, daughter of an Idaho potato farmer, Lloyd, and his Japanese wife, Momoko. It's also the tale of Cass Quinn, Yummy's childhood friend, left to live in the aftermath when, 25 years ago, 14-year-old Yummy ran away from home. And it's the tale of the Seeds of Resistance, a group of young, anti-bioengineering activists who travel the country staging demonstrations at supermarkets and schools in an RV modified to run on, natch, french-fry oil.
The novel traces the interfamilial fallout from free-spirited Yummy's fleeing: the deterioration of fundamentalist Lloyd's health, Cass' father's financial failing and Momoko's foray into the exotic seed business to surreptitiously help support her wayward daughter. The action is driven by now-successful, unmarried academic Yummy's first visit to Idaho in 25 years (with her three differently fathered, multiracial children in tow, much to Lloyd's initial chagrin) to help with her parents' failing health.
That the potato is a central metaphor here (it's one of the few plants that can reproduce by cloning) seems contrived, but among Ozeki's many talents is the ability to flip complex ideas into self-evident truths (e.g., homogenous potato-growing techniques, like racial purity, is bad; seeding and cross-pollination, like racial diversity, is good).
Ozeki has created something of an epic, and though her tone can be off at times (as with the stereotypically portrayed "punks" of the Seeds of Resistance), she's carving out a niche in a genre -- feminist, anti-Frankenfood, Japanese/American politi-fiction -- she's created all by herself.
Paperback Original
By William Rhode Riverhead, 464 pp., $14
Right off the bat, the very worst thing about Paperback Original is its title -- or at least the signal that title gives. It immediately labels William Rhode's first novel as yet another example of the growing McSweeneying of publishing, hinting that this book will be another self-referential, inside-joke-y, Gen-X novel about a writer writing about himself.
And it is.
Fortunately, that's only a starting point for Original. Ostensibly, the book wants to present itself as a tidy little feedback-loop; our narrator, Josh, tells us about the process of gathering material for his novel, and the story of that research becomes (presto!) the novel in our hands. But despite the tiredness of the frame, and despite his obvious desire to stamp his work with a "meta-" prefix, the story Rhode actually delivers is considerably more engrossing than its title and conceit would suggest.
The catalyst for Josh's story comes from his father's will. Josh is promised a small fortune, on the condition that he immortalize his old man in a bestselling novel -- a project for which slacker Josh has little enthusiasm, and given his limited success as a journalist for Delhi's Hindu Week, little ability to accomplish.
Rhode wisely lets his metafictional ambition fade into background as his plot takes off. While his point may be to mock the machinations of pulp fiction, he hits the speed, quantity and tone of incidents just right: The complicated plot he builds around Josh, a couple of his friends, a love interest and a flashy Bombay heroin dealer maintains an impressive velocity. Rhode even works up to a true neo-noir darkness in certain segments, and shows flashes of a black sense of humor throughout.
Original comes off, in the end, as surprisingly successful genre fiction. Even with the pat realizations Josh reaches about himself at the end, and despite its surface layer of mockery, it makes for a good, absorbing read. One suspects this is hardly what Rhode intended for his first novel, but the good beach book he writes thoroughly trumps the pretensions of the frame it bursts out from.
-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there
