I know. You’re suffering from Man Booker longlist fatigue too. However, I give you my word that this and Alan Warner’s The Stars in the Bright Sky are the only titles on the longlist that I have any interest in reading. For a while it seemed that Christos Tsiolkas‘ The Slap was the novel that everyone in Australia was reading, discussing and arguing over. It’s a little pleasing to know that the novel is having the same divisive effect overseas. Nonetheless, The Slap feels inherently Australian, so intimately linked with our issues as a nation and as a culture that I have to wonder if it has the same potency outside of our shores.
The Slap is also one of those books where you feel like a broken record in repeating the plot, so intrinsic is it to the title and the hype surrounding the book. At a barbeque in suburban Melbourne, fittingly with multicultural backgrounds and a variety of age groups present, a man slaps a misbehaving young boy who is not his own. The Slap follows the consequences and reverberations in the lives of those who witnessed the slap that afternoon. Intriguingly, all of the stories, despite the multicultural, gender and generational differences, are all told in the same the same third person voice.
I expected class to play a big role in The Slap, and was surprised to find it difficult to recognize any class aspects coming in to play. The Slap opens with the perspective of Hector, a man who is hosting the barbeque, and is feeling not so much trapped, but definitely unappreciative of the benefits of his middle class male existence. The parents of the slapped boy parrot politically correct dogma, echoing sentiment they believe they should have – and are noticably poorer than the rest of the characters. Sure, the characters throw around “middle-class” as an insult, but for the most part it seems that class has become such an intangible issue, secondary to cultural, gender and generational differences. Tsiolkas is forcing us to look at the negative aspects of all of these characters regardless of their financial position, we’re invited to explore their faults. The characters are hugely unlikeable, except for the two younger characters.
Anouk, a childless by choice writer on a television soap, should have by all rights appeal to my liberal sensibilities. She too has made the unpopular decision to not bear children – most of the female characters in The Slap are burdened by their choice to have children, motherhood defines them. She is a confounding character, it is difficult to understand how someone so supposedly intelligent can have such simplistic views about class and her friendship with Rosie. Why does someone who fiercely holds to her decisions in all other aspects of life so quickly back down for someone she doesn’t even like any more? It’s a question that is raised repeatedly through The Slap, and the answer seems to be compromise. It’s not a romanticized compromise, it’s a compromise always marked by bitterness and resentment.
Anouk’s liberal attitude only gets her so far though, and in particular it made me extremely frustrated that she is so ignorant about the culture that lies “out there”, beyond her inner city comfort zone. Her presumption that her usual treatment of immigrant men – a Muslim taxi driver in the given example – is above the “immense sea of indifferently racist Australians out there, a world that existed – as far as she could tell because she’d never visited ‘out there’ – somewhere beyond the yellow lines that marked the inner-city zone-one train and tram tracks on the Melbourne transport maps.” This hit hard, as I live in the forbidden blue zone two and I resented Anouk’s inner-city presumptions because it felt like they were, implicitly, a reflection on me. However, while doing some research on my electorate for the recent election, I discovered some interesting facts that reaffirmed my position. My electorate has the highest proportion of Muslim residents in Victoria, the third highest in Australia. For Anouk, Muslims represent her taxi drivers, “out here”, they are our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues. Yes, racism exists in the outer suburbs, but it is not any worse, or any better, than inner-city exclusive racism.
The shallowness of Anouk’s nameless apology for her rudeness to her taxi driver is later strengthened by Manolis’ later comments about the ease with which Australians say sorry. Forgiveness is a large part of the Slap, characters seek it, characters forgive for the wrong and right reasons, yet the hollowness of these apologies was always read through the lens of Manolis view, and reflected on the greater problems related to our own national and cultural apologies.
The words dropped easily from her lips but they meant nothing. Australians used the word like a chant. Sorry sorry sorry. She was not sorry. He thought she loved him, respected him. He’d nursed this hope for years. He wanted to strike himself for his vanity and foolishness. He had never asked anything of her before and she must know that he would never ask a thing of her again. Sorry. He spat out the word as if it were poison.
Anouk is not the only frustrating character in The Slap, the other adult characters are completely unlikeable: emotionally unavailable, potentially violent and dangerous, dangerously irresponsible, constantly lying to each other and themselves. However, The Slap is thematically very rich, covering so many aspects of contemporary Australian life that it would be impossible to cover them all in one review. One other thing that had strong resonance with me was the nature of compromise. This could be because I am much too self-involved to truly understand the complexity of compromise involved in marriage, relationships and motherhood, but The Slap repeats that compromise made under the guises of these important roles are often made to someone characters are not even sure they like, let alone love. There is a deep-seated resentment behind these decisions which is not healthy. The Slap asks the question of where do our loyalties lie? With family? With friends? With strangers? With ourselves? The answer is never clear, and identity is so built upon traditional roles that, by their very nature, force us to define ourselves in relation to another.
Again she experiences a wave of weariness, a numbing heaviness to her neck and shoulders, to her very bones. This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unattainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired.
And then, there is Connie and Richie. One of the things I loved about Tsiolkas’ debut novel Loaded (incidentally, does anyone else think that the Ari at the barbeque who gave Hector speed could possibly be Ari from Loaded? Just coincidence, or a wink to knowing readers?) was the exploration of a multitude of complex issues and themes related to growing up in Australia through the energy and exuberance of youth. Tsiolkas knows how to write about adolescence in a way that, compared to the hateful and bitter adults, gives hope: I almost wonder why he is content writing about middle-class, middle-aged bores when the real passion and excitement comes through his sensitive treatment of his younger characters. Connie and Richie are marked by a fear and anticipation of the future, but in their confrontation with their future, they change in a way that the adult characters can not. Previously held prejudices disintegrate as they learn, adapt and evolve. They are the only ones truly willing to forgive their friends and family of minor and major transgressions, and thus the real hope of The Slap lies with them.
In summary, I can’t honestly say that I liked The Slap. It didn’t leave me giddy with pleasure, but it did force me to think about issues about identity and compromise, and for that I am appreciative. It begins to approach the problems and concerns confronting contemporary Australian society in a way that is easy to relate to, yet avoids taking an overly moral tone. It is a completely frustrating novel for so many reasons, but absolutely a worthwhile read.
Picking up graphic novels blindly, or relying on familiarity with author and illustrator names, publisher imprint and recognized titles has served me well so far. That is, until I decided to pick up and take home Si Spencer, Simon Gane and Cameron Stewart’s The Vinyl Underground: Volume One Watching the Detectives. It looked like a pop culturally aware, mod styled graphic novel but too much effort has gone into creating elaborate back stories for annoyingly quirky characters and not enough into creating engaging plot lines.
The Vinyl Underground is a team of misfits who work together to solve occult killings in London. Led by Morrison (Moz) Shepherd, the D-list celebrity son of an English football player and pornstar turned soap actress, a tabloid regular, drug addict and ex-con. See what I mean by elaborate backstory? Very little of this has anything to do with the plot of Watching the Detectives, the character histories are already set up and little is done with the story to develop them any further. Joining Moz in his hip converted underground station apartment is Perv – another ex-con whose seizures offer him psychic clues to the crimes they are tracing – and Leah, a forensic science graduate working in a mortuary and virgin online porn star. The keen-eyed among you will recognize that the two female characters mentioned in this overview are both porn actresses. More on that later. When a young African boy’s head is found washed up on the riverside, Moz and his team set out to find the occult connection and solve the murder. Enter Abi, African princess and Moz’s ex-fiancée, whose father has been wrongly accused and incarcerated for the crime.
Don’t give me that crap. You’re all in this Scooby Doo bullshit vigilante thing together.
The story, despite the promising premise, is murky and unengaging. A subplot about Moz’s missing mother and his father’s involvement with London gangsters is so intent on remaining mysterious that the direction is unclear. Rather than letting the story develop the characters (my sister has a great t-shirt that reads “Plot – it builds character.”) the writer has dumped a load of affectations and quirks upon them and the story drags under this weight. What insight is given to the characters’ past, Moz in particular, does nothing to connect me with them emotionally. I just didn’t care, about the story, the characters or the artwork.
I also take major issue that the main female characters are either princesses or pornstars. I know graphic novels aren’t particularly renowned for their anatomical realism but the women here are presented in such a cartoonish manner, looking most of the time like grown-up Bratz dolls. And don’t think for a moment that having a virgin pornstar is a comment on the bipolar view of female sexuality – again, the contradiction is supposed to be seen as a wacky impossibility. As for Leah, it is as though the writers thought that being restricted from showing her in explicitly sexual imagery (although there is plenty of this) they’d substitute that for her executing extreme violence wherever possible. In The Vinyl Underground Leah’s violence is unmotivated and largely pointless. When Moz is unable to get through to crooked criminals or protect himself, in jumps Leah to brandish her girl-styled violence – there is way too much use of a stilletto as weapon that is probably intended to be an empowering image.
The female relationships are fraught with jealousy and petty bitchiness, again, seemingly unmotivated. Leah’s not interested in Moz, yet takes every opportunity to belittle Abi’s contribution to the group. Abi is defined solely by her relationship with males: looking to help her wrongly jailed father she turns to ex-fiancé Moz. Sure, there are hints that she’s highly educated in the psychogeography of London, but does that come into play in the narrative? Of course not, and why should it when she has the handsomely troubled Moz to come to her aid?
The Vinyl Underground features flat characters and a dismal storyline that doesn’t resolve itself clearly. I’m going to go and read another volume of Transmetropolitan to cleanse my palate.
Here comes morbid Jess again, harping on about death. I only picked up Mark Wakely’s Sweet Sorrow: A Beginner’s Guide to Death because the library catalogue suggested it to me when I was looking for something else (although along similar lines, Kenneth McKenzie & Todd Harra’s Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt. Now looking at the Book Depository I realize it hasn’t even been released yet, so it must’ve been one of the titles I came across when going through new release lists at work.) I thought I was in for something appealing with Sweet Sorrow when I saw the epigraph was from a Philip Larkin poem, but this is a brief introductory look at the death care industry and its aims are too broad to explore any of these endlessly fascinating issues in detail. However, if you’re not familiar with what goes on at a funeral home, a morgue or a palliative care unit, Sweet Sorrow is a gentle guide through these industries that care for us before, during and after death.
Motivated by a growing need to confront his own anxieties about death, Mark Wakely sets out to investigate the rituals surrounding mortality. He states from the very beginning that Sweet Sorrow is intended to be read as a personal enquiry rather than a comprehensive report. Between chapters are fictional excerpts about a woman losing her father which I thought I would find grating and unnecessary but added an emotional dimension to Wakely’s investigation. Written in a conversational tone, Wakely guides the reader in an informative, considerate and sensitive manner.
Did you know that until the 1940s and 1950s most people died at home? Compare that to now where 80% of Australians can expect to die in hospital, thus making a look into the palliative care industry necessary. Here he describes the physical deterioration of death, the psychological aspects of a patient’s inevitable death, the impact on families and the ways palliative and hospital staff cope with the constant confrontation with death. Wakely visits a morgue to learn about how autopsies are conducted – for those concerned, this is the most visceral the book gets – and what circumstances require an autopsy. Wakely’s visit to a coffin factory is interesting, seeing how they’re made and the different options available, including decorative designs, custom designed coffins and environmentally friendly coffins. Say, bookworms, how about a bookcase that can be converted into a coffin?:
Just when I was reassuring myself that there would be no space to store a coffin in the small apartment where I live, along comes British designer William Warren with yet another twist to the story of coffin-making. The furniture designer has created a shelving system called ‘Shelves for Life’, a set of floor-standing plywood bookshelves that come apart and can be reconfigured into a coffin. William wrote to me about his design:
“The Shelves for Life are part possession, part preparation. They are not a coffin yet; they simply have the potential to be a coffin in the future. We’re all going to die and we will all need a coffin, so why not make your coffin something you’ve owned and loved for years and save your bereaved family having to choose one for you at an already difficult time?”
Visiting funeral homes Wakely learns about the differences between independent and conglomerate funeral companies, outlines how and why an embalming procedure is completed, and how people express their grief. Other funerary rituals that are discussed are the delivery of the eulogy, choice of flower arrangements and the most popular songs played at funerals – Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” being one of the most popular here in Australia, although Monty Python’s version of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is another popular choice. (Always wanted The Rolling Stones’ “Shine a Light” myself.) The choice between burial and cremation is also explored, however briefly.
It is this brevity that makes Sweet Sorrow an ideal choice for a reader wanting a basic and gentle introduction to the rituals and routines surrounding death in the Western world, particularly in Australia. I would have liked to see more about how different cultures and religions view and treat death but Sweet Sorrow is firmly situated in the traditions of the Western world. For those wanting something more in depth Sweet Sorrow provides a broad overview of our social and cultural rituals but ultimately offers nothing that couldn’t be learned from watching a couple of seasons of Six Feet Under.
Finally! I sped through Paper Towns over the course of roughly twenty four hours; staying up until 2am (hey, that’s pretty late for me now) and finishing it off in one sitting the next day. The mystery surrounding the narrative of Margo Roth Spiegelman demands the readers attention. I’ve made it pretty clear in my reviews of both Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines that the female characters in John Green‘s young adult fiction come across as mere devices for the enlightenment of the male characters, but in Paper Towns Green seems to be critiquing that approach, or at least questioning the validity of it.
In Paper Towns, John Green again creates quirky outsiders just on the edge of full-blown geekery; I often wonder how much of these male lead characters are evidence of Green’s own idiosyncratic personality. Quentin Jacobsen, or Q as he is more commonly known, is close to graduating from high school. Friend to the band geeks, but not musical himself, his social group hovers towards the outer edges of the high school milieu. His next door neighbour is the queen-bee of the high school social world, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who he has been madly in love with since they were children. As children, they discovered a dead body in a local park but drifted apart over the years. Until one night, just a few weeks away from graduation, Margo appears at his window and lures him into a night of adventure of elaborate pranks and spirited youthful antics. The next day, she disappears.
It was life as it had always been — only more fatigued. I had hoped that last night would change my life, but it hadn’t — at least not yet.
Q is left behind with a series of clues, including highlighted passages of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, and induced by his all too brief contact with Margo, sets off to find her and discover who she really is. Until about halfway through I thought that Paper Towns was going to follow the same paths as Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines – and while all three novels have very similar storylines, Paper Towns diverges from the usage of a female character as the gateway to the male’s understanding of love, life and everything in between. While Q’s quest does have aspects of this, the combination of analysis of “Song of Myself” and Q’s unveiling of his illusions of Margo and lack of real understanding or knowledge of her as a person elevate Paper Towns to a increasingly complex self-referential piece of literature.
And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made — and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make — was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.
In discovering Margo, after an epic twenty-four hour road trip with his closest friends (and it must be mentioned that Green writes friendships so well), Q learns that a) she didn’t want to be found, and b) his illusions and his idealization of her does not match up to the “real” image of Margo Roth Spiegelman. This unequal distribution of images of a person isn’t unsettling to Q’s entire understanding of life, however, but offers him a lesson in the perception of the Other, and that ultimately reveals more about himself than it does about her. While Margo is an intriguing character, the novel is about Q’s revelation about perception and understanding, and it is written in such a beautifully simple and engaging manner, keenly aware of the growing pains of adolescence. Margo is used as the motivation that sets in motion Q’s mission to further self-awareness, but in a much more complex and satisfying way than Green’s previous novels.
I have so much more to say about this novel, but I think it is going to take several further readings before I really am able to articulate what I want to say. (And, incidentally, I think that someone with the knowledge and extreme patience with French psychoanalytical theory could write a killer Lacanian analysis of Paper Towns.) However, Paper Towns is a deeply insightful novel, with characters and issues that are easy to relate to, and, finally, a female character that is more complex than divining light for the slightly awkward male character.
Seeing Helen Garner talk last week at the Wheeler Centre (some video footage from the event is now available online) has given me reason to return to her work, even though I was not wholly convinced by Monkey Grip. (Although, I think because at the time I was still recovering from removing myself from a similarly vicious and cyclic relationship, that may have been the cause of my vehement reaction to Nora’s actions. I do intend to return to it when my feelings about that situation aren’t so volatile. I suppose my point being that personal circumstances always effect how you read a book, but it isn’t the only way.) I had started The Spare Room in the lead up to seeing Garner’s discussion, but hearing her talk so eloquently about her craft has inspired me to further explore her writing.
I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon.
In The Spare Room, Garner has fictionalized her own experiences; Nicola, a friend dying of cancer seeks refuge at Helen’s house in Melbourne while undergoing experimental alternative treatment. The conflict arises not from Nicola’s visitation, but rather her refusal to accept her fate and her endless hope in what Helen sees as disreputable. As the battery of the treatments take effect and require more and more of Helen’s physical assistance, the emotional impact begins to take its toll. Confrontations with the practitioner amount to vague threats and uncontrollably (and understandably) emotional outbursts of anger, the support of Nicola’s family members offers some respite but is all too brief.
We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.
The emotional impact on the reader doesn’t come solely from the question of the morality of shady alternatives that falsely encourage hope in terminally ill patients, but rather the strength of the relationship between Nicola and Helen, even at its darkest and when all hope appears to be lost. As an unashamedly selfish twenty-something, it made me ask myself the question of how far would I be willing to go for someone I care about? What responsibilities to our loved ones do we hold in our relationship with them? To what extent are we willing to accept responsibility of their well being? In The Spare Room, Helen is happy to take on the draining routines of care even though she wasn’t asked, but she also recognizes her own inability to fully deal with the situation.
Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches our virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.
The Spare Room is moving, but not in an abrasive or showy manner. By outlining the daily routines associated with caring for the terminally ill loved one in clear-eyed and honest prose it presents it as a quiet reality. Littering it with references to iconic Melbourne landmarks, events and streets adds to this sense of everyday reality, but again, it’s not the sense of location that is the focus of the novel – it is in the relationships and the question of responsibility within them.
When I read Francesca Lia Block, I tend to go on a binge of her writing, catching up on everything that has been released/acquired by local libraries since the last Block binge. A chance wander into the young adult section at the library and I happened upon the slight Blood Roses, very likely setting myself up for another rampage of her dreamy prose. Blood Roses is composed of brief glimpses at the lives of a group of very loosely connected evolving young women. Block’s signature chimerical prose takes us through these moments of transformation imagined as supremely powerful and magical.
Essentially modern day parables of adolescence, Block introduces mythological elements – centaurs, fairies, angels, aliens, and such - into everyday adolescent lives in order to articulate their various struggles. A boyfriend imagined as an alien with supernatural powers over his paramour. An abused daughter who sees Death taking home in her dollhouse. A grieving young man meeting a young fairy to escape from his pain. A girl who finds herself transforming into a giant after her first kiss.
What shall we do, all of us? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?
I’m not usually into such fantastical elements in my fiction, but the way Block writes about them makes it possible to read them as allegorical, imagined in order to cope with the stresses of life. Her prose is so luxurious and sumptuous, so based in the natural amid a chaotic mechanical modern world. It’s not a style that is for everyone (and I myself wouldn’t be able to only read this sort of writing), but it is brilliantly evocative, even when talking about admiring the scars of the clipped wings of (well, possibly) an angel. I think that is where the power of Block’s writing lies, in an ultimate belief in the possible and the power of perception.
Emily Maguire’s Princesses and Pornstars is a call for the recognition that feminism is still a necessity in contemporary Western society and beyond because of the bipolar images and representations of women. Written in an accessible and highly anecdotal style, Maguire demonstrates how the political impacts the experiences and limitations of our personal lives, and how the feminist fight is not even close to being over. It offers a reasoned argument for the abolition of outdated gender binaries in order to take that step closer toward the ideal of equality.
Maguire’s central arguments are what you would expect: female sexuality as commodity, how culture reinforces gender roles and how conflicting messages screw with our perception of ourselves. The idea of sexuality as the most valuable commodity a woman has continues to reign supreme, promoting harmful notions of control of female sexuality – in the social (the stigma and meaning of “slut”) and political sphere (women’s reproductive health issues). Cultural images of female empowerment for the most part merely reinforce traditional gender roles – princess culture and hyper-sexualized popstars (here Maguire builds on Ariel Levy’s raunch culture argument) – offering young women a space to explore themselves but only within the boundaries of what society defines as acceptable outlets. The Madonna/whore dichotomy is still at work, princess/popstar, offered under the guise of female empowerment. There is still a widespread, ingrained belief that woman’s essential being lies with her sexuality and her image. Look around you. It’s everywhere.
The dilemma at the heart of male reactions to feminism is rooted in the fact that the traditional values of masculinity depend on the oppression or subservience of women for their expression.
Maguire looks at sex education in Australian high schools to highlight how little we are teaching female students about their bodies, and how what is being taught encourages particular political messages regarding the position of women in society, and the methods that students have to resort to in order to learn – Dolly Doctor anyone? The chapter on marriage and the negative social stigma of the single woman and the assumption of motherhood as woman’s natural role is eye-opening and of particular interest to me. Social constraints are constantly impounding upon our personal choices, and we have to not only be able to see them at work, but to actively confront and challenge them. The complex pornography argument arises too, with a look at mainstream porn, alt-porn, and Maguire manages to articulate what unsettles me about the whole alt-porn phenomenon in a way I have never been able to:
[...] the genre nevertheless does push its own version of the ‘perfect woman’: tattoos, dyed hair (blue-black, magenta or peroxide), piercings and pale skin. And even if the women look ‘alternative’ (or, you know, normal), the existence of the site is still dependent on the idea that women must look a certain way for the pleasure of a male audience. Just because you’re all done up like Bettie Page doesn’t mean you’re retro or transgressive. It’s only another costume like air hostess or naughty schoolgirl. [...]
In a sense sites like SuicideGirls are more troubling than mainstream sites because they let the buyers off the hook. A man can pretend to himself that he is deep, sensitive and caring because the chick he’s wanking over is, like him, deep and sensitive, not like the big-titted blond whores at hotwetsluts.com. The SuicideGirl models fit the perfect image of a certain type of guy who loves girls who are tortured and angsty, who write poetry and maybe cut on their wrists a little, who are wild and crazy angry and tough, but who are also small and vulnerable and in need of a deep, emo dude to help them cope with life. And also, they’re way sexy. The men who get off on this particular male fantasy get to masturbate to images that make them feel like a saviour rather than an exploiter.
Although I really enjoyed Maguire’s arguments in Princesses and Pornstars, at times the chapters felt like introductory newspaper columns about a multitude of issues, issues which deserve more time devoted to them. But, as an introduction to the continuing importance of feminism and the basic concerns we face now, it provides a strong and vital message. It has encouraged me to seek out further reading along similar lines. Thankfully, Maguire has included a list of “suggested reading” to guide the reader in the right direction.
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Cassie Wright is a pornstar past her prime. In order to go out with a bang (ahem!) she plans to film her attempt to break the world record for serial fornication. Six hundred men.
Snuff zooms in by giving us the perspective of four individuals involved in the proceedings: Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600; and Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and the mastermind behind the project. It takes a while for the book to really distinguish the voices of the three men, whereas Sheila’s voice is always clearly defined. The three men start as a blur – minor representations of the collective jerk jockeys (Sheila’s term, but her constant use of similar slang terms is amazing.) – but through their interactions with one another they do steadily reveal their personalities. This could potentially make a great play; a character study of three men and a woman in a green room for a pornography film.
Cassie knew Marilyn’s secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That’s who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.
It is Chuck Palahniuk, so it is coarse, aspects of the pornography business are explained in great detail. There is an undeniably adolescent fascination with the flesh and all things bodily. By writing about the contentious subject of pornography there was an opportunity to explore some of the finer arguments surrounding it – briefly mentioned through Sheila’s point of view, but that all falls by the wayside very quickly in favour of advancing the story. The plot makes you think you know where it is going, proves you correct, but then twists things so suddenly that you almost feel naïve for believing you knew what was going to happen.
Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.
Didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie.
But, that is what also makes it so much, dare I say it, fun to read. Things don’t go exactly as you imagined them, but then there is that horrifying realization when you see where it is actually headed. To reveal too much would be to ruin the enjoyment offered by Snuff.
(Also, it introduced me to the exploits of Roman empress Valeria Messalina. I do enjoy the way that Palahniuk weaves together moments and figures of history into his narratives.)
Stepping Out: A Novel: The new novel by French-Australian author Catherine Rey opens in provincial France in the 1970s, with the eighteen year old protagonist, dressed in borrowed platform shoes and a cape, and with her possessions in a plastic bag, abandoning her home and schooling, to move in with her lover Marco. Two passions fuel her rebellion: rage at the cruelties of family life, particularly those inflicted by and on her mother; and a deep commitment to the act of writing, despite the obstacles imposed by convention, provincial prejudice and the indifference of the literary world.
Enticed by the candy coloured striped cover on the “new books” shelf at the library, I picked this book up without knowing anything about it or the author. It is the story of a young woman who leaves her family to live with her older lover, and then of her struggle to assert her increasingly creatively stifled self in a world which dictated a woman’s place in the family home. It is told by the woman – Catherine, it seems this is a largely autobiographical piece, as many of the books the character publishes are also titles that the author has published, then why subtitle the work “a novel”? – in her fifties of her late teenage years. Most of it doesn’t seem to have any sort of retrospective insight into her actions, it is largely told with the arrogant girlish voice of adolescence. Admittedly, this self-awareness does come to light further on in the novel, but it is rather vague. When she writes about the act of writing and the freedom and deception involved in doing so it is interesting, but the rest of her writing does not live up to this supposed passion for the written word. Rey gets tangled up in concepts of feminism and authorship but her points never quite coalesce to make a coherent argument. She utilizes these heavy concepts without engaging in their true weight, almost like she is making mere mention of them for the sake of giving her work the illusion of depth.
If I look around for meaning, I can’t find it in any of the models presented to me: not in sancrosanct maternity, or social success, or family life, or even in a relationship. So just where is happiness hiding? Only writing comforts, compensates, lulls, offers protection and salvation. Happiness flares up in words.
This book is largely forgettable, no matter how many tragic turns her life takes. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it is just an awkward translation as much of the prose is riddled with use of cliché and simple language. Memoir or novel, perhaps it doesn’t matter: one woman’s efforts to overcome the tyranny of family and perceived gender prejudice and succeeding, despite numerous setbacks. Through it all she maintains a steadfast belief in her choices, and her absolute right to be able to make those choices.
Few things are as fundamental to human happiness as sex, and few writers are as entertaining about the subject as Mary Roach. Can a woman think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Why doesn’t Viagra help women – or, for that matter, pandas? Does orgasm boost fertility? Or cure hiccups? The study of sexual physiology – what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better – has been taking place behind closed doors for many hundreds of years. In Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science, Mary Roach steps inside laboratories, brothels, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs – even Alfred Kinsey’s attic – to tell us everything we wanted to know about sex, and a lot we’d never even thought to ask.
This is a quick, and enormously enjoyable and eye-opening read. Roach uses a humourous conversational tone throughout, she doesn’t needlessly get bogged down in scientific terminology, and when it is necessary to do so, great care is taken to explain everything in a simplified manner. The downside of this, however, is that it sometimes seems like not enough time is spent fleshing out some genuinely interesting experiments that are being examined. Just as you begin to really get a good grasp on the information at hand, the chapter ends, and it is a little disappointing.
The chapters follow a well-crafted episodic structure, each one neatly links in to the next and the connections are explained. I can imagine that the information in this book would make a compelling documentary series, but it would need someone with the deft skill of Roach to make it so. Roach doesn’t take a dry approach to her subject, she doesn’t just spit out chunks of scientific journals. While this is generally a positive thing, I feel like it also contributes to the lack of depth. Instead, she interviews many intriguing characters and researchers – such as the Taiwanese urological surgeon, the manager of a sex toy factory, the Danish pig inseminators – and she even participates beyond the expected authorial call of duty. Roach combines her hands on participation, field experiences, and her scholarly research to fully engage the reader in to the world of sexual physiology.
The conclusion appears to be that despite all the leaps forward that science has made in the area, there is still much that we do not know, suggesting that human sexual response is such a complex one that we will never fully be able to understand all the minute facets of it. Considering that some of the research done as recently as the 1950s seems to be, by current standards, almost ludicrous in execution and conclusions, we have to wonder just how far we have to go toward a complete – if indeed such a thing is possible – scientific understanding of the sexual responses of humans.
Further Reading:
- The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines.
- The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America by Meika Loe.
- some basic knowledge of the Kinsey Reports is helpful when reading this as well, they are mentioned throughout a lot. A cursory glance at the wikipedia article should be more than enough.
