Fiction by or for Women: Three Books Reviewed

I Don’t Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson (A-)
No Place Like Home, by Barbara Samuel (B)
In A Lonely Place, by Dorothy Hughes (B+)

It always makes sense to expand your horizons, and this month (this month and then some–sorry) I thought I’d look at contemporary women authors. Not talking canonical stuff here, but more popular literature, the sorts of things that are informed by the female experience, and in two cases, marketed toward women. I don’t like getting deep into sex-based generalizations to second-guess authorial intent, but it can be an interesting exercise to look at how authors treat them.

I Don’t Know How She Does It about a successful woman balancing work and family could be described as “mom fiction.” It was hard to find characters to identify with here: Kate, the protagonist, isn’t much like me at all, but I think that’s more personality than gender. Her racing mind dwarfs the stimuli from her external life, and the contrast of her thoughts (stern at home, sweet and funny at work) to her actions (sweet at home and stern at work) are a great vehicle to reveal character. She’s an easy woman to like, if only she’d calm down for ten minutes. I suppose I’m more like her husband–I’ve had a good upbringing that’s robbed me of overambition–but I don’t quite get that dude’s dull entitlement either. (He’s easy to write anything onto because Kate spends the novel ignoring him.) I had kids at the same chronological time as that fictional couple (though I am younger), and while in grad school, did some daddy-at-home time while my wife won bread. A man, especially a young one, was at best a novelty, but more often was beneath the notice of the local Muffia, and I really enjoyed Pearson’s pokes at those overbearing ghouls. (Now my poor wife spends more time scratching her head over their bizarre commitments.) I couldn’t get behind the noxious men who had a path paved to business success (if I were to encounter in the workplace the level of overt misogyny that Kate did, I’d be appalled), nor the women who were conflicted about their maternal instincts, even if I could (and still can) relate to the way that dual incomes run roughshod over family life.

There’s a certain prose form that’s been working its way into the literature for the past 20 or 30 years, a certain ironic hyperbole that compounds everyday observation with huge absurd metaphors, almost at the end of every sentence. Off the cuff, I’ll guess that it started as soon as anyone saw fit to parody Raymond Chandler, but whatever the origin, it’s worked itself into something of a standard. I love it, and Allison Pearson wins big points for doing it well. She has a lot of fun with the verbal gymnastics, and the pace of the language is a good match for the frantic knot of the main character’s mental state. Low on plot (but with an entertaining movie-script denoument), the book flies by as fast as Kate Reddy thinks. I Don’t Know How She Does It is told in the first person, in present tense, in roughly real time. It gets us in Kate’s head, but it’s a framing device that doesn’t quite work. An entry like, 8:17 AM: Am rushing to cab… makes little logistical sense (unless, of course, she’s somehow dictating), but the book is too diary-like to be an internal monologue either.

The premise of this novel–a woman that tries to succeed as both a proper English mum (can I ever tell you how much English classisms bug me?) and a badass executive–is one that invites an exploration of gender roles, but none of the major or minor characters captured very well the complicated perspectives of the people even I know. Even with humor (and maybe especially with humor), this honesty is essential, and I think it’s where Pearson lost the opportunity to write something powerful instead of something light and disposable. It would be difficult to resolve the setup without appearing to approve one side or other of Kate’s dual drives, and when she starts extolling motherhood as a compulsion straight from the womb, you can hear the faint crackle of a message, and by the time she introduces and quickly martyrs the novel’s only saint, it’s screaming in your ear. The successful (balanced) women in the showcase are either wives, or else have assumed some bullshit girl-acceptable career. (To put it another way, I’d rather have any one of Kate’s female friends managing my hypothetical funds than the douchebag men she worked with.) The men, the best and worst of them, are all overgrown boys that need a little mommying. She doesn’t criticize the subtler chauvinism of Kate’s “good” boss, nor that of her inappropriate romantic interest–they’re just boys who have been failed by women. It’s all so very comfortable with old traditions by the end, I found it disappointingly at odds with the way Pearson opened the story.

#

No Place Like Home was something I searched for, trying to get a glimpse of the single mother with older children, a big step right into the divorced-mom neighborhood of the chick-lit* ghetto. This one was touted as a “genre-blender,” and the conservative cover (another reason for my choice) would seem to support this classification. I don’t read much in this style, but it seems to this caveman that the only thing that kept Fabio off the cover is fifteen years of gravity audaciously added to subtly drag down the bosoms, and some sentimental familial elements to get that patina of respectability. None of this gets around the way the male lead (improbably named Malachi), is introduced:

“…hair the darkest shade of cinnamon brown, eyes the color of bitter chocolate, skin tanned as dark as Brazil nuts because that’s where he’d been, leading an adventure tour down the Amazon. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans and heavy boots for riding that motorcycle…”.

I try to keep an open mind about genre fiction, especially for something like romance–80% of the novels ever written contain a romance, after all–which to my mind, is only separated from the general fiction shelf by a good review and/or a hunkless cover. What’s more, I get it that different writers, writing for different markets, will have their own values of what’s noticable and worthy of description, which probably explains why Samuel doesn’t let a page slip by without gushing over some aspect of Malachi’s hypermasculine phsysique. Hell, I can accept some measure of fantasy wish-fulfillment too, even if we’re not talking about my particular brand of fanboy escapism here.

But there is a mighty temptation to sin in any sort of genre writing, and the biggest snare is to let the readers’ expectations write your book for you. Down in the genre projects, a lot of the blueprints are already in place, and an imaginative writer can use these to show off some creativity, or to turn the lens on the structural assumptions, or to use the stock outlines as a starting points to go somewhere else entirely. It’s not the scaffold itself that’s interesting, it’s all the stuff that the scaffold holds up. If you just deliver the expectations without testing them, then there doesn’t, as they say, end up being a lot of there there, just another McMansion you drive past in Romancetown.

Samuel wanted a there, at least a physical one. No Place Like Home is a story about a woman who followed a band out of her (and the author’s) hometown as a teenager, now returning with a teen of her own and a dying friend in tow to rediscover home and family, to find a place in it. Samuel handles some of the interactions with reasonable competence, if not very deeply. The more interesting aspects–her relationship with her Dad, her relationship to a terminal friend, the family’s Italian-ness, her son’s reticence at encountering a potential new father (and husband) figure–all get shortchanged to extol the indulgent lie of a character that is the male lead. Malachi is a dangerous and preternaturally handsome loner who also manages to be protective, communicative, thoughtful, and committed, needing only the right woman to save him. (It’s enough to make me keep holding out for my own sexy green-skinned Martian babe.) He’s good match for Jewel the reformed rebel, I suppose, but then this book doesn’t attempt to capture rebellion very ambitiously, which, as a consequence, doesn’t lend much force to all the wholesome reconciliation happening in between the paeans to Malachi’s nut-brown torso. The redemption theme keeps it slightly less fluffy than I expected from this sort of book, but it’s still all a little easy, and a little light. In other words, not great literature here, but enough to get your rocks off.

#

Lost in the bowels of Slate’s human network is a conversation I had with our own Mel shortly before she ducked offline, regarding detective novels and women. I chose Dorothy Hughes’ In A Lonely Place trying to imagine the sort of book Mel would write. To that end, I wanted to uncover dark crime fiction that, if I couldn’t find something with a female detective lead, at least somehow subverted or played with the hypermasculinity I associate with noir. A hunt on Amazon revealed a series of pulp classics authored by women, and this one got the highest ranking of the bunch. Although it seemed like a novelty at the time, I shelved it right between my collection of Peter Whimsy stories and my lone Agatha Christie tome. I guess crime fiction was hardly just (or hardly best) a man’s game sixty years ago, anymore than it is today. Oh well.

When I cracked open this novel, I felt a tremendous let-down: the prose is just awful. Hughes wrote the whole book as a series of simple declarative sentences that evinced no particular rhythm, and certainly no pleasures of sound, expression, or description. (For some reason, my mind failed to connect to the popular, rather minimalist authors of the times.) In the few places where the tension accelerated my reading, the prose aspired to be invisble, but in the subtler dramas of shared looks and perceptions (He was angry. He looked at her. She couldn’t tell. She gave him a stare.), it was completely unevocative. Oddly, I felt guilty about this. If I’m reviewing a book with someone in mind, I want it to be a good book.

It took nearly half the book to realize that Hughes’ poor “telling” didn’t overturn any old writing maxims. Her vision is fine, she’s just not very good at saying it. In fact, by the end of the book, I became impressed by the subtlety of how the author tugged at expectations. The point-of-view character, Dix Steele, is introduced as (and is named like) a traditional war hero: ace pilot, good looks, confident. The author sets up a good chill by the third page–the “hero” is a cold-blooded bastard, a killer. His point of view is refreshingly not cerebral. Dix doesn’t analyze himself, there are no boring internal monologues or tired episodes of psychobabble. Hughes doesn’t get past Dix’s own self-image in the narration, which is indolent, narcissistic, not very articulate (for a would-be writer), and hinges on a confidence that’s genuine but not always maintainable. It must have been a challenging storytelling approach: it succeeds exclusively on what’s shown. (For this reason, I bet the movie was great.)

I didn’t like the character, but despite his evil, he’s not insane exactly, and I almost wanted an out to present itself for him. His background doesn’t inspire the confidence he shows (and though Hughes barely mentions it, war death appears to have affected him strongly). I don’t know if it takes a woman to poke holes in that masculine self-assurance and to expose the possessive notions of romantic love, but she calls it for a facade, opaque enough to obscure the other characters as well as the plot itself. The red-headed femme fatale is not the frighteningly sharp vixen she appears, his friend’s wife’s odd behavior isn’t attraction, and the investigation proceeds not through detective heroics, but routinely and behind the scenes as Dix Steele spins his borrowed wheels with growing urgency. The unraveling is cleverly paced, and manages to rise above the blank narration. Glad I stuck with this one.

Keifus

*Sorry. Anyone got a better word?