Reviews

Deliver Us from Evie The Charioteer Foxfire The Necessary Hunger Art and Lies

Deliver Us from Evie
(M. E. Kerr, 1994, 177pp.)

The Burrman family owns this farm in Missouri. A little on the small side, and the mortgage hasn't been paid off yet, but they're doing all right, if barely. The family consists of the Mr. & Mrs., their son Parr, and their "other son," Evie. Kid's pretty butch. Elvis butch. Can fix anything mechanical on the farm, better mechanic than her dad. Has a peroxide skunk stripe in her short-cropped dark hair, gets harrassed by the mom for the butch threads and the hands in pockets, has the butch swagger, smokes, tells very butch farming jokes - "Only difference between a pigeon and a farmer today is a pigeon can still make a deposit on a John Deere tractor." She's a thoughtful sort too, more introspective than the rest of her family, even the fairly sensitive Parr. Has dreams of leaving for college. And when she meets gorgeous, sophisticated Patsy Duff, the daughter of the banker who holds the mortgage on the Burrman farm. Do they fall in love? Of course. In short -- Evie is a complete mystery to her family, even Parr, who idolizes the ground his big sister walks on. In a nice twist, the reader follows Parr's journey of discovery and understanding of who his sister Evie is and what kind of world they live in, as Parr's is the narrative voice of the book.

The Charioteer (A Modern Love Story)
(Mary Renault, 1959, 347pp.)

Here we have a dreamy, musing tale of development, hero-worship, disappointment, and redemption, all knit together by a many-layered love. Mary Renault broke with her more customary historical era of ancient Greece to set our tale against the backdrop of England struggling under the Blitz. During Laurie O'Dell's recovery in hospital for injuries sustained during the evacuation of Dunkirk, he reflects on the intense devotion he had felt toward one of his classmates at prep school, which was the defining coming-of-age moment of his young life. As he regains his mobility, he falls in with a crew of interesting friends, both at the hospital and among the gay military community in Britain, notably including the Spitfire pilots of the RAF, who use methamphetamines to starve their bodies of sleep long enough to defend the nation for another night... and another night... from the bombers of the Luftwaffe. Eventually he finds his path toward starting a new life involves completing the circle of his youthful development.

Some of the marvels the reader comes away with include the transcendent nature of the love that Laurie experiences; the emotional depth of even the bit players in the tale such as the nurses at the hospital; the surreality of being an invalid whom others are trying to surround with tranquility during a time of desperate war; the vividness of the fleeting depictions of combat; the interconnection of all the events in a life lived with introspection yet vigor. It's noteworthy that although the central pillar of the book is love shared between men, the homosexuality of the main character is nevertheless far from being his defining characteristic. This issue of identity also forms a supporting theme of a growth process which the protagonist must work through.

The Charioteer is one of Mary Renault's most beautiful works. Here's a characteristic passage which will always stay with me:

Seven o'clock was familiar and domesticated. With luck and good management, at seven his mother might still be sitting on the edge of his bed with an infishished story. Eight was unusual, and associated with trouble: having been punished, or being sick. Nine was the wild outpost of an unknown continent. Ten was the mountains of the moon, the burial-place of the elephants: white on the map. He lay staring with round birdlike eyes at the dim lapping of light on the ceiling, incredulous of the journey he had made alone.

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
(Joyce Carol Oates, 1993, 328pp.)

Foxfire is a forceful expression of the hypnotic charisma of the self-destructive leader, raging in the violent opposition of a system full of a thousand small tyrranies. A breakneck rollercoaster ride through the dark side of the "idyllic" fifties, it follows the exploits of five teenaged girls who respond to misogynistic violence, ignored by uncaring or complicit authorities, by meting out their own brand of vigilante justice. What begins as nonviolent comeuppances bringing the misdeeds of abusers to light soon spirals out of control.

Similarly to M.E. Kerr's Deliver Us From Evie, the exceptional nature of the central character is accentuated by using more of an "everyman" sort as the marvelling narrative voice: the most levelheaded of the girl gang, steady and thoughtful Maddy. And to some degree the book is a coming of age story for Maddy. But its driving force, and the motivator behind this phase of her life, is a mysterious outsider who goes by "Legs" Sadovsky, who is equal parts knight in shining armor and violent lunatic.

The Necessary Hunger
(Nina Revoyr, 1997, 365pp.)

From the first time Nancy Takahiro, one of the top high school basketball players in Los Angeles County, watches Raina Webber play, she's overwhelmed by an odd blend of intense competetiveness and tongue-tied longing. When she learns that Raina is a fellow lesbian, her youthful hormones go even further into overdrive. What do you know, Nancy's father and Raina's mother have to go fall in love and decide to move in together. Nancy ends up exquisitely unsettled, living in close contact with her crush and rival, who alas! is already in a pretty heavy relationship with an older girl. Nancy has to simultaneously deal with her feelings for Raina, her sense of rivalry with her that also serves as an inspiration (when it's not fueling an inferiority complex), the colleges that compete for her favor and wave tempting athletic scholarships, and the racism that her parents endure from former friends who freak at their interracial relationship. If all that isn't enough, there's also Nancy's love/hate for the area of South Central L.A. where she lives and the affection she has for her high school life and friends that makes her regard college with a sense of dread and loss. Finally, just as she and Raina've finally begun to ease into a more comfortable stage in their awkward, competetive relationship, they find themselves on opposing teams in a league playoff where Nancy's uncertainties about herself, as well as her unrequited longing for Raina, make the outcome of the game more than a matter of winning or losing. And in the book's conclusion, Nancy realizes the price you can end up paying for hesitancy and fear of rejection.

Art and Lies (A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd)
(Jeanette Winterson, 1994, 206pp. + The Trio from Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss)

Art and Lies is a novel without a plot, stream-of-consciousness writing taken to an extreme even for Jeanette Winterson, who has always been a rather surrealist writer. Virginia Woolf, the pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness style, called her Orlando, a fantasy she deeply enjoyed writing, a "writer's holiday." Jeanette Winterson's writing has always been characterized by a strong element of stream-of-consciousness style, but in her works other than Art and Lies, it's been mortared together with a fairly cogent plot to prevent the constituent pieces from flying apart in a storm of unfocused poesy. I wonder if Art and Lies was her "writer's holiday." The only parts of the book that resemble conventional prose are the broadly humorous sections in the voice of the "bawd." However, Winterson's trademark talent for offhanded literary moues that crack you up when you're least prepared is certainly out in force in this novel.

I have said this book has no plot. Strictly speaking, that's not quite true. The book follows the intertwined lives of the "three voices" Handel, Picasso, and Sappho (who are not - and yet are - the historical figures those names imply). An interesting effect of the orgy of metaphors is that when "actual" events transpire, you've grown slow to take things at face value, and the realization that something has occurred in earnest comes almost like a blow.

It's far from an unpleasant read, but you have to be willing to adjust your expectations of it as a novel and let go of the concept that it should be a journey whose course from one point to the next ought to be clear. Instead you've got to be ready to accept it a sentence at a time, to read for the pleasure of reading rather than with an expectation of logical outcomes. The events that transpire are often connected but don't have to be, and the connections that actually do become obvious aren't clarified till nearly the end. I suspect Jeannette Winterson's groundbreaking works culminating in Art and Lies (and the popularity of these works) were the inspiration for second-rate imitators like the masturbatory Yann Martel and the atrocious Paulo Coelho.

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