Sex, Scrooges, and Screwballs: The OA's Fall Library
Girls, Interrupted
Two new books from the coastal South examine teenage pregnancy from the female perspective.
Discussed:
I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl: A Memoir by Kelle Groom (Free Press, 2011)
Salvage the Bones: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2011)
Chat message 1386: I need to get firefighter out of my head. I've never been one night standed before. Its not fun
Chat message 1387: Its life. Im more pissed that i even care
Chat message 1388: Dumb boys
Chat message 1389: The worst part is that if he does call even now, ill drop things to go hang out. I hate being a girl
—Casey Anthony text messages to Amy Huizenga
If we learned anything about Casey Anthony, it is that being a young, single mom is difficult—and if you land in trouble, the whole world will opinionate on your slattern ways. As if in response to the biblical outrage spawned by a duplicitous unwed momma, two new books navigate the treacherous ocean that is girlhood—that hormonal tide of recklessness—in a culture that is both permissive and moralistic, especially when it comes to young females and their bodies.
I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of A Girl, a memoir by the Florida poet Kelle Groom, takes a back-and-forth, jigsaw approach to personal chronology. As the (mouthful of a) title suggests, the prose is highly lyrical, feminine even—and though the language seems tipsy, it's crisp. In junior-high, Groom gets her first taste of booze and boys, that inextricable mix:
Drinking is easier than I'd imagined, less dramatic. I feel myself cohere around a radioactive center, my arms reaching out like bright flowers. Where I end blurs.
She follows a neighbor boy inside his house and he kisses her:
He's all over me like a din of insects. And where he touches me, I appear.
The beauty of memoir in wise hands is that the author can take a stock character (a drunken teen, for example) and twist your perceptions. Groom turns the experiences of a party girl inside-out, illuminating the architecture of willful oblivion. In a few sentences, she renders an evening of carousing—the blurry rush of emotions and images—with the sparky precision of a Rembrandt etching:
I love the burning, how the drink is nearly undrinkable—a potion that changes me, makes me unafraid. The glow that spreads through my body like the moon on the ocean. Before I black out, I kiss my best friend's boyfriend. A girl runs down the street screaming. Hours later, I come to on my doorstep. It's nearly 2 A.M. Still hot out, humid. A friend of Sharee's has walked me home. Tall, he's something to lean on. His face shines in the heat. The porch light comes on over our heads. My dad opens the front door. Furious.
At nineteen, Groom becomes pregnant. She has the baby, a boy, and gives him away to her aunt and uncle, who are childless. She never sees him again. The boy develops leukemia and dies before he is two. Her life is messy, all blind curves and screeching brakes. She is in and out of detox, group therapy, community-college classes. An evening in a club leads to a blackout that lifts at dawn on a disturbing scene: the author on her knees—they're rug-burned raw—in an unfamiliar suburban home, three strange men standing over her. This is Lynchian territory, suddenly. Disturbing, unpolitically correct questions may arise: Did Groom ask for, or somehow cause, this perilous situation?
Fearfully inhibited people—like Kelle Groom—loosen up when they drink. Kelle's the quiet kid. Her family talks for (and around) her. They laugh at her silence because they think it's cute. She thinks it's a sickness. "When I drink, I need people and don't hide it—it feels as if I'm joining the living, speaking." A few sheets to the wind, she feels freedom but, of course, it's a cage. A girl's body forms a perfect prison.
"Once a doctor told me that I was made for having babies, the space between my hips a perfect house. I was made for this." Way too late, she realizes she could have spoken up. "I didn't know I could change my mind. I didn't know I could keep you."
The memoir roams all sorts of tricky terrain concerning female behavior, but Groom's not concerned with societal strictures. She's bracing and matter of fact—no sermonizing, no blame gaming—but she's also warm in a way that some people who are scarred just aren't.
Incidentally, Kelle Groom's story mostly takes place in Orlando, Casey Anthony's hometown, the balmy dreamland of the magic kingdom. But even Casey Anthony struggles for political awareness as she reconciles the gains and losses women have faced in the last forty or so years:
Chat message 1825: I want a guy to take me out. Its been years!
Chat message 1826: It's the damn feminists i tell you.
Chat message 1827: They wanted equality and they sure got it. Sadly the rest of us have to deal as well
Jesmyn Ward's new novel, Salvage the Bones, is told by a teenage girl named Esch who is yearning for attention. It is summer, the unstable season on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Esch has just finished tenth grade. (Ward's first novel depicted the same threadbare community, a poor and remote region, sparse in resources and population, rich in the afterglow of racial and social injustices.) Her mother has died in childbirth and she is surrounded by men (three brothers and a mean-drunk father). Here is Esch describing herself: "I am small, dark: invisible." Like a lot of girls, Esch does not feel pretty and she hovers around her two older brothers and their friends, more like an admiring spectator than an active participant. She is achingly available, finding it "easier to let [boys] get what they wanted instead of denying them." Sexual encounters, for Esch, are emotion boosters for they offer the temporary sensation that she is loved. She is painfully, endearingly naïve: "The only thing that's ever been easy for me to do, like swimming through water, was sex when I first started having it. I was twelve." Esch has a massive crush on her brothers' friend Manny, an arrogant, handsome boy with a girlfriend, who ignores Esch except when he is having sex with her. Every time Esch sees Manny, he shines with light—"Manny catches all the light from the fire, eats it up, and blazes." (She doesn't see his flaws, but the reader does.) Her father worries about hurricanes, so frequently that the kids don't take him seriously. Most storms veer off to Florida or fizzle out in the Gulf. This time, however, the storm has a name. As her father warns, "Like the worst, she's a woman: Katrina." Ward's references to women and nature and childbearing bind the story like stitches in a Caesarian section. Her brother Skeet's pit bull, China, is giving birth to a litter of puppies (Skeet's hoping to raise them to fight other dogs for money—a career alternative to selling drugs). Esch watches with revulsion and wonder, blunt in her description:
Her sides ripple. She snarls, her mouth a black line. Her eyes are red; the mucus runs pink. Everything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.
The nursing process is equally visceral, and when Esch sees that "all eight of [the dog's] titties are so swollen with milk they look like human breasts," she vomits. Esch's sick spells escalate till she steals a pregnancy test from the store and learns she is pregnant. She wants Manny to acknowledge her, to kiss her on the lips (which he's never done), and to look in her eyes. She waits while her belly grows. There is a gory dog fight—the postpartum mother dog now pitted against her mate. The old TV with bad reception tells them to evacuate. Her father rips down the chicken shed for boards to put over the windows. Three of his fingers are chopped off in the process. Blood gushes, tension builds. Katrina is coming, first wind like trains, then the rising water. This book is impossibly beautiful, permeated with fertile life fluids—blood, water, love, sweat, breast milk—and the lush, but harsh, natural environment. The sound of cicadas in the trees is "like fitful rain." The live oak trees are "so big and old their arms have grown to rest in the dirt." Motherhood itself is a complex matter in Ward's view—shaded with violence culminating in Katrina, "the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered."
—CAF
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain by Dwight Macdonald (New York Review of Books, October 2011)
In the 1940s and 50s, entrepreneurs in America began bridging the chasm that separated high culture (Joyce, Stravinsky) from kitsch (vaudeville, rock & roll). By marketing a new, all-encompassing aesthetic, these businessmen hoped to take the veneer of the avant-garde and polish it until it was accessible to everyone. Examples of this included the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which in 1946 sought to popularize and make more accessible the difficult text of the King James Bible; the Book of the Millennium Club, which in 1951 offered, for $249.50, all of Western culture edited and synthesized into a hundred-pound package that was sold door-to-door; and Reader's Digest, which streamlined the reading process by editing out the most difficult or challenging parts of novels. Dwight Macdonald, a writer for The New Yorker, Esquire, Partisan Review, and The Nation who died in 1982, called this blurry area between high culture and kitsch "Midcult," and he devoted his career to attacking it.
The strongest essays in Masscult and Midcult, a collection of Macdonald's magazine pieces from the 1930s–1960s, are those that offer him an opportunity to take down particular examples of Midcult (which William Shawn, his editor at The New Yorker, encouraged him to do—some say as an attempt to ward off charges that The New Yorker itself was middlebrow). In Macdonald's essay on the Book of the Millennium Club, he follows the efforts of Dr. Robert Hutchins and Dr. Adler, two University of Chicago philosophers to whom the Encyclopedia Britannica gave two million dollars, a team of forty graduate students, and the close attention of a marketing hack named Mr. Harden, to synthesize and compile the "Great Ideas in the Great Books" into forty-four books and something called the "Synopitcon," a guide to the Great Ideas in the history of Western culture. What follows is a tour de force of sarcasm and scrutiny, as MacDonald tries to read all one hundred pounds of books. Along the way, he reports smartly on the marketing effort behind the project, explaining how the public bought fewer than 2,000 sets of the Great Books in 1952 and 1953, yet beginning in 1955, after a huge door-to-door sales pitch was combined with glossy magazine ads featuring Adlai Stevenson, sales skyrocketed. MacDonald has great fun with the peculiarities of this effort, such as the fact that door-to-door salesmen were given a phonetic chart for pronouncing author names but weren't required to read any of the books. By 1956, the series had sold more than 100,000 copies.
For Macdonald, the threat of Midcult to the arts and literature was greater than that of mass culture. "Midcult has the essential qualities of mass culture, but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In [mass culture] the trick is plain—to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.... It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming." By being harder to spot and passing itself off as genuine High Culture, he feared that Midcult would bring down the hard-won, high artistic standards of the Modernist avant-garde, which tried to insulate itself from the demands of the market so that it might pursue pure artistic achievement, represented, for Macdonald, by the work of the pre-War Modernists: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, Kandinsky's Picture with a Circle, Frank Lloyd Wright's "Prairie Houses."
Macdonald, in other words, was opposed not to the democratization of entertainment as such but to the cultural relativism it engendered. He championed (and tried to create, through his work as editor at Partisan Review and his founding of the journal Politics) an intellectual community that was anything but relativist, a community that articulated a strict set of standards and "encouraged creativity by (informed) enthusiasm and disciplined it by (informed) criticism." His ideal for such a group was "the old avant-garde of 1870–1930, from Rimbaud to Picasso, [who] demonstrated this with special clarity because it was based not on wealth or birth but on common tastes. Common didn't mean uniform, but rather a shared respect for certain standards and an agreement that living art often runs counter to generally accepted ideas. The attitude of the old avant-garde," MacDonald writes in the title essay of this collection, acknowledging the contradictions of his own position, "was a peculiar mixture of conservatism and revolutionism that had nothing in common with the tepid agreeableness of Masscult."
Unfortunately, like the political causes Macdonald championed—he was long-involved with the anti-Stalinist left and fancied himself an anarchist—history has not been kind to his cherished concept of Midcult. The cultural lines that Macdonald defended have mostly gone the way of the Berlin Wall, replaced by a heterogeneous culture of blended boundaries. Beginning in the 1960s, critics like Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Stuart Hall, and Robert Venturi celebrated this new sensibility as seen in the soup cans of Andy Warhol, the blinking architecture of Las Vegas, the films of David Lynch, and the political potential of pop music. Today, framing cultural critique as a battle to uphold the distinction between high- and lowbrow seems quaint if not irrelevant.
The same could be said for some of the essays here. In particular, Macdonald's weaknesses emerge when he veers away from a blend of criticism and reportage into more straightforward lit crit. In his scathing eulogy of Ernest Hemingway, for example, Macdonald is at times acerbically right-on—such as when he says that Hemingway possessed "the kind of nihilism that most of us get over by the age of twenty." But at other moments his theoretical meanderings lead him down dead ends. He interprets Hemingway's decline—evidenced here by the paradox of The Old Man and the Sea, one of the author's worst and most popular novels—as the result of the same pressures that elsewhere in Masscult and Midcult Macdonald sees as impinging upon the great 19th century novelists (Balzac, Dickens, and Twain). "The market pushed them too hard," Macdonald writes, to turn their personal selves into marketable personas as well as to produce books that could appeal to wider and wider audiences, in the process thereby losing the idiosyncratic touch that made their novels so singularly great. In the case of Hemingway, Macdonald concludes tidily that "I think it was [his] lack of private interests which caused him to kill himself when his professional career had lost its meaning." He's probably right that the market pushed Hemingway too hard, but that's hardly an explanation for the author's suicide or for the decreasing quality of his later novels. What were the particulars of Hemingway's life that led to his decline? About those details MacDonald is mum, and instead he subjects Hemingway to the same process of depersonalization that he is so opposed to when carried out by the grinding wheels of Masscult.
This doesn't mean we should forget Macdonald. At its best, Masscult and Midcult, most of which was written nearly sixty years ago, was uncannily prescient. The Midcult sensibility Macdonald attacked is everywhere apparent in the 21st century, even if artists and critics today have mostly sidestepped or embraced the middlebrow. (Even Jonathan Franzen has forgiven Oprah and reconciled himself to her Book Club.) As such, Masscult and Midcult may seem dated simply because Macdonald was so right. His was a mind working its way through the contradictions of cultural life at a moment when art hadn't yet become inextricable from commerce.
—WGE
Americanization: Lessons in American Culture and Language: A Novel by Angus Woodward (Livingston Press, 2011)
Biti Namoeteri comes to an unnamed American university from an equally unnamed tiny South American country, primarily to attend graduate school, but, as with most new arrivals, his real education takes place while traversing the American cultural labyrinth. We experience Biti's gradual slapstick assimilation through a series of exercises and vignettes in Angus Woodward's Americanization: Lessons in American Culture and Language: A Novel, a hilariously crafted postmodern novel wedged into the template of a social-studies textbook for immigrants. Biti's American odyssey falls somewhere between David Eggers' What Is The What and Abbott & Costello's riff "Who's on First."
Conceptual novels are hard to pull off, especially funny ones, but Woodward avoids killing his joke by swapping between essays explaining the details of American life and dramatized scenes. For instance, in "Chapter Two: Making Friends" our hero gets embroiled in a pyramid scheme almost immediately upon moving into his depressing graduate-student apartment.
Associates: Peers who become underlings in a business venture.
Biti attempts to apply what he's learned.
Biti Namoeteri: Hey! Check out this.
Lady on Bus: No, thank you.
Biti: Very well then.
Biti: Would you care to purchase some emergency products, or perhaps enroll in a very beneficial retail program?
Middle-Aged Classmate: I gave at the office.
Biti: ?
Biti's stumble through mail-order schemes eventually leads him to Janet Broccoli (Woodward lampoons the Pynchonian penchant for saddling characters with signpost surnames) and the next circle of American hell: the personal injury lawsuit. Biti remains the blissful rube as his host country's worst traits encroach on his innocence like a virus eating a healthy cell. Biti's relationship with Janet and everyone he encounters is increasingly predicated on corruption and money. In a grammar unit labeled "The Modal Auxiliaries" found in a section detailing Biti's lawsuit, we get:
Could: In the present tense, indicates possibility, e.g., "I could real go for some of that courthouse coffee." Also serves as the past tense of can (see below), e.g. "Before all this happened , I could imaging our future together rather easily, but now I cannot imagine what will happen tomorrow."
This sort of indictment would grow tiresome were it not for Woodward's hairpin-turn humor and Biti gaining his footing on Americanization's slippery slope. The definitions grow colder and more duplicitous as the moral acrobatics Biti performs become trickier, leading readers to wonder how any of us make it through this thing called America, guidebook or no.
Favorite line:
Mens: Although it is not in any dictionary, "mens" is widely used as a label for men's restrooms.
—Alex V. Cook
Angela Sloan: A Novel by James Whorton, Jr. (Free Press, 2011)
James Whorton Jr.'s third novel Angela Sloan is a dazzler. At times, reading this novel feels like you've driven up on a car with its headlights on bright in the middle of the night and complete disorientation ensues. For starters, the plot pivots after the Watergate break-in scandal, and transforms into a reverse spy thriller. It's the peak of bell-bottomed America, and the story is told from the point of view of a fourteen year-old girl. However, the bewilderment is temporary, and the novel never loses its place, the destination is clear, and even the human absurdity is believable under Whorton's talented authority. Whorton has masterfully juggled questing oddballs before, in his two previous novels Approximately Heaven and Frankland.
At the beginning of the story the narrator, Angela, who will use other aliases as needed, tells us that she was saved from certain slaughter in the Congo where her family perished. Her savior, Ray Sloan, informed a murderous mob that she was a drowned girl who had come back to life, and if anyone touched her that their body would dry up like husk. Ray prefers drinking alone and chain-smoking to deep conversation. He's a special agent finishing up his service in the espionage business. Angela mostly takes care of Ray, buying his cigarettes, and medically administering bourbon knowing he'll need a doctor's care if he ever went without. After the break-in they quickly encounter codenamed accomplices Gristle and Horsefly and, fearing the worst, agree they must get out of town, and to communicate via cryptic classifieds in the World News Digest. Although Angela is two years shy of legal driving age Ray gives her a five-minute master class on driving an automobile and in probably his longest statement in the entire novel, one that is potently Portis-esque, he states his car care basics:
"Don't ever let the fuel level drop below half a tank. Top it off at the end of the day. Every week, check the oil. To check the brake lights by yourself, back up to a wall. Carry spare bulbs in the glove compartment, and carry a screwdriver. Don't give some bored police officer a reason to pull you over. The first thing he'll want is your license, and then there goes our cover. Above all, we must not go to Tennessee. It would be the worst place in the world for us, once we get our fake Tennessee driver's licenses."
Ray instructs Angela in the mechanics of clandestine work. "All that I'm about to tell you is secret." And then, suspecting that the hotel clerk is an informant, Ray states the secret code word "Idaho," and disappears, leaving Angela alone with the Plymouth Scamp, a few hundred dollars, and her Undercover 101 knowledge ready to put into practical use. The story ambles into comedic picaresque, traveling through multiple states, encountering strange hippies, and overly friendly chatty types as Angela tries to find Ray. She pairs up with Betty, an illegal Chinese immigrant with communist leanings. Angela is not quite sure what to make of her, but they form a strong bond for the reasons that you'd expect from lonely and scared people. The ending nicely sorts out the ultimate fate of everyone involved, but, more rewardingly, encapsulates the true measure of Angela's strange journey and her personal development as a young woman, orphaned in a wildly disillusioned post-Vietnam pre-Carter America.
—Matt Baker
