Paperback Jukebox—Why Did I Ever by Mary
Robison
“Long novels written today are
perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot
love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own
trajectory and immediately disappears.”
– Italo Calvino
Mary Robison makes me crazy. She disrobes me, eliminating my senses of
order and sequence, making me feel like a pile of bronzed remote controls. Her fragmented, piecemeal narrative passes
over and through me like electrified water: I feel it as a shock, but after it
passes, I possess no clear and precise nuggets of meaning—I only feel the
reverberations of a giant’s passing. Whether these are the symptoms of love or skepticism remains to be seen.
The premise is clear enough: our
narrator, “Money” Breton, is a failing script doctor with A.D.D. (and maybe
multiple personality disorder). She
spends her days doing God-knows-what with her best friend, Hollis, and is
occasionally visited by her daughter, Mev, who’s hooked on methadone. Her son Paulie, the victim of a mysterious
crime we only gradually come to understand, is under police protection in New
York.
What is more difficult is the form
the story takes. It consists of
chapters, but each is comprised of short, numbered (or titled) sections. Several sections may make one scene, but we
may also be in different states, times, or with different characters from
section to section. Chuck Kinder
recently told me that writing in the first person present tense was “like
dragging your reader around on the windshield of a car.” In Robison’s narrative (which is almost
unfailingly first person and present tense) I feel plastered and
bug-splattered, but it’s exhilarating.
In these two sections we move
suddenly from an image, presumably a remembered scene of Money’s son Paulie, to
the present tense of the narrative:
53
Paulie’s
hands. They’re large to begin with, and
make him bashful and can sometimes seem in his way. Now he has, in reaction to some goop he’s taking, a rash and must
wear white gloves. Big ridiculous
gloves. So it’s even more like he’s in
a cartoon.
Turn
off the Radio
There
are alcoholics all over the South. Many
of them are inside the cars on this same highway. The alcoholics left over are minding the store.
A
cycle of preoccupations (most notably with her son’s trauma) sustains this
otherwise peripatetic narrative, holding it up until a rare moment of clarity
arrives. Clarity's chariot, however, is
disaster, and I begin to wonder how long I'll keep my sympathy (if my
attention) on a character so hell-bent on evading the responsibilities of the
living. Money loses her cat and job
after job, and yet it seems as though the narrative careens from pithy observation
to humorous scene, only driving toward its secrets in fits and starts. Is this just an irresponsible narrator, or
is this an irresponsible narrative?
Some moments I absolutely
buy. They’re funny, clever, and
beautifully imagined. Sometimes I laugh
aloud. When talking to a doctor to try
to get into a mental hospital, Money thinks, “He doesn’t care that, on the way
over, a skyful of silvery little fish almost made me wreck. Or that all the other cars kept getting
ahead of me, even though some of those drivers never gave a thought to Sylvia
Plath.”
Other moments I don't buy. They seem like cheap tricks, narrative
laziness, so much entertaining flotsam. It’s funny, I think, and it establishes voice, but this far into the
book I know the narrator’s voice, and I just want something to happen. In one of many scenes in which she talks to
herself, this:
251
“You
know why you’re having this strong a reaction to things,” I say. “It’s because of those marshmallow pies you
ate. Four of them? I can’t believe you did that!”
“I can,” I say. “No surprise here.”
Such sections depict our narrator
as a mess, a lost and broken underwater creature. But it's a big fake-out. The writer (and thus the narrator) clearly speaks from the point of view
of a very savvy ex-academe, and so her assumed naiveté is either an act or the
result of unspeakable trauma. Well, she
gets around to speaking the trauma eventually, in her fragmented way. Bit by bit information about her son’s
assault surfaces, made more arresting by its emergence from all the quotidian
gobbledygook. On page 78, at the end of
the sixth chapter, we finally get this information, coming in staccato
sentences that seem to further indicate our narrator’s difficulty in speaking.
219
I can
fit the palm of my hand between Paulie’s eyes. I know what it feels like to do that.
That man hanged him. For one thing. Had him hanging. By the
neck.
When I get to a moment like this,
all my doubt is erased. Robison is a
master, I think. She has just been
manipulating me all this time, touring me around her crazy world, making me
laugh, making me question her methods only to throw real horror at me without
warning. And when these moments come,
my hair is blown back; I find to my surprise that I care for the characters, I
ache for them.
Whatever my concerns about its form, I can't
stop reading this book. I'm as stuck on
Mary Robison as I am on diet coke—she might not be good for me, but I just
can't put her down.
Paperback Jukebox—Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
In 1970 Paula Fox was concerned about two
things happening in New York. Wealthy
people were moving from Manhattan to the boroughs, buying homes in marginal
neighborhoods and endlessly defining and redefining the term “social
conscience” at dinner parties. At the
same time, publishers and editors were viciously trimming away the messy
excesses that had characterized much of the fiction of the 50s and, especially,
60s. Writing was once again becoming
“spare” and “minimal,” a trend that was heading we-all-know-where in just a
couple of years. Fox presciently braids these two developments
into a short, dark and claustrophobic narrative about what it means to be
civilized. On its surface, Desperate Characters is the portrait of
a marriage, but beneath its surface lurks portraits of a city and a craft at a
time of great social and economic change. The word “gentrifier” may not have existed in
1970, but Sophie and Otto Brentwood are the reason such a term became
necessary. They live on a Brooklyn
street lined with garbage, human waste and stray animals. Otto is a lawyer who recently split with his
long-time partner over disagreements about the representation of problematic
clients. Sophie, who the book’s point
of view follows and favors, is a jaded academic who has begun to turn away from
translation work. Their house is
flawless and suffocating, strangled by its own good taste. The Brentwoods’ civilized lifestyle has its
foundation in walls and limits. They
rely on structures – a house, a marriage, a type of language – and maintain
clear distinctions between inside and out.
The enemy in this book is infection.
Sophie, however, is a complicated character. She wavers between dread of the outside world and a persistent
wish to be harmed. It is implied that
this complication is rooted in a perverted sense of generosity and that this is
what leads her, in the novel’s opening scene, to feed a stray cat. The animal expresses its gratitude by biting
her. The breaking of her skin begins
the anecdotal action of a novel told almost entirely in vignettes. As her fear of rabies builds, Sophie
reexamines the structures on which she relies.
She prods them and finds flaws.
She contemplates old infections.
She picks at these weaknesses like a sore, both repelled and
irresistibly drawn, terrified of pain she believes she deserves. “If I am rabid,” she finally asserts with a
good deal of relief, “I am equal to what is outside.” There is a lot of food in the book. People are constantly (and Fox is very
pointed about the symbolic value of these actions) cooking, eating, deciding
what to eat, and examining their own level of hunger. The description of kitchens is one of the primary techniques with
which Fox represents character. In the
middle of the book, Leon, an aging and cynical leftist, describes civilization
in terms of cooking: “You take raw material and you transform it: that is civilization.” The act of willingly taking something into
one’s body, of infecting oneself with
nutrition, must, in the paranoid atmosphere Fox creates, be done with great
care and style. The book begins with a dinner. The Brentwoods sit down inside a small, dark
dining room to nosh on a meal of chicken livers. These livers are a very Foxian detail. Smelly, palpable, they still (with their hints at pate) represent
civilized sophistication. It is a very
high-brow meal and Otto is uninhibited in his dismissive talk of the world
outside of the walls. Much later in the
book, the livers reappear. The
Brentwoods use the leftovers as bait to trap the cat so that it can be taken to
the doctor, killed, and tested for rabies.
Using Leon’s phraseology, the “raw material” of the livers has been
transformed. They still represent
civilization, but civilization is no longer a quiet meal. It has become something much more ruthless. In 1970, in New York City, Fox witnessed the
beginnings of gentrification. She
watched as civilized “good taste” was used to bait, strangle and kill entire
neighborhoods. And then she wrote a
book that is an artifact of this inevitably emerging taste. The unchecked inclusiveness of the 60s was
over. Writers began to edit. Soon, books like this would be embraced:
books that built walls and careful structures, books lacking any arbitrary words,
books in which every sentence can be marked as a turning point. In this way the perfection of Desperate Characters is its own
enemy. Why choose civilization if it is
as brutal as the world outside, but more false? The book generates a great deal of rage and frustration against
the significance of its own thoughts and meanings. Its very precision points us toward a terrifying meaninglessness,
a rabid world where thoughts such as these have no importance.
Brendan Kerr comes to Pittsburgh via
Elkins, West Virginia and Brooklyn, New York. He is currently working on
revision of his novel, 'The Uses of Talent' and rocking with the band
Workshop. He lives in Polish Hill.
Paperback Jukebox—Earth’s Children by Jean Auel I'm a sucker for a series. It doesn't even
have to be a good series. Case in point: Earth’s
Children, best known for its first installment, Clan of the Cave Bear. The novels, of which there are five to date,
don’t exactly belong on a list of Great Books. They are melodramatic, contain
long passages of uninterrupted description, and employ characters too perfect
to be believable. But at the same time,
the story is so compelling, so meticulously researched, and so accessible for
such an esoteric storyline that I find myself captivated. Earth’s
Children is historical fiction based in the brief time
period when Neanderthals and modern Homo Sapiens co-existed. Nobody really
knows how the Neanderthals died out or what sort of contact, if any, they had
with our forbearers, but author Jean Auel creates an entire world based around
the interaction between the two species (sub-species, if you want to be
anthropologically correct). At the beginning of Clan of the Cave Bear, Auel orphans a 6-year-old Homo Sapiens waif
and has her discovered by a small band of Neanderthals who take her in. Auel
goes back and forth between the emotional struggles between the two types of
people within pages upon pages of description that read like an anthropology
textbook (hunting weapons, the preservation of meat, whole chapters on herbal
medicines). Ayla, the heroine, is tall, blonde, curvaceous (she's played by
Daryl Hanna in the hideous 1980s film adaptation) and brilliant. She invents
everything from the sewing needle to the domestication of animals. The first book is great for those who want to
geek out over prehistory, but the author seems to have wanted a broader appeal
with the rest of the series. Beginning in book two—cue the primordial
saxophones—Ayla is about to get some. She finally meets a man of her own kind
(6'4'' and muscle bound with ice blue eyes that are sooooo sensitive). Passages
describing the construction of a hide shelter are back to back with phrases
like “thrusting manhood” and “warm woman well.” It’s steamy enough to rival any
dimestore romance novel, but researched enough to appear as a companion reader
to a general anthropology class. If this juxtaposition seems a bit unlikely,
it’s fitting that Auel herself is an oddity in the literary world. Clan of the Cave Bear was not only her
first book; it was the first piece of fiction she had ever written. She also
began it at age 40, after her five children were grown. Auel had been a housewife until her late 30s
when she got an MBA. Then, despite
having no previous writing experience, she refused the job she was offered at a
bank in order to write a short story about a prehistoric cave girl. The short
story became a novel and the novel became a series. Of course, it helps the
housewife-cum-literary-phenomenon is a card carrying genius (she’s a member of
Mensa). Quite a helpful credential when one undertakes to describe dozens of
prehistoric societies in accurate detail with no previous anthropological
training. The breadth of her research
is mind-boggling, including three different methods of primitive boat
construction—each depicted in such detail that you could conceivably go out and
make your own watercraft. It does seem a bit forced, but it’s worth the loss of
literary flow to wonder at the sheer volume of knowledge that Auel presents
throughout the series. I admit, I love it. This may have something to
do with the fact that I was an anthropology major. Plus, I would wager that
these are the sexiest books ever written for dorks. And who doesn’t like to
read a little smut now and again? But
heaving bosoms aside, the story of the beginnings of civilization is so
gripping, so thought-provoking that I devoured all five books in record time
and scoured the web for news of a sixth (it’s coming!). And I’m certainly not alone in my
fascination. Clan of the Cave Bear broke all records of fiction sales by selling
several million copies of its hardback first edition, and the series continues
to break records with each release. I find the idea of such an improbable
storyline having mass commercial success as interesting as the books
themselves. It seems that there are more dorks in the world than I
imagined.
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