Monica Shores

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

admin — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:05:00 +0000

There’s no shortage of texts examining Jean Rhys, the woman whose writing is as highly regarded among second wave feminists as it is among literature professors. Rhys herself was at work on a memoir when she passed away in 1979, leaving behind the collection of pieces that became Smile Please. Drawing upon this incomplete autobiography, Carole Angier published Jean Rhys: Life and Work in 1991, a more definitive tome linking Rhys’s life events to the people and situations in her fiction. It is in the wake of these books that The Blue Hour, a new biography written by Lilian Pizzichini, is delivered, and Rhys aficionados will justifiably wonder what this work adds. Does Pizzichini intend to endear Rhys’s work to a new generation through electrifying accounts of her life? Does she have new insights into Rhys’s upbringing or a different angle through which to explore the novels?

Pizzichini herself may not know what role her book serves; the foreword is unhelpful at explaining the title. It has something to do with perfume and “dogs hunt[ing] best during twilight.” In another strange choice, each chapter is prefaced by a summary of that section’s highlights. It remains to be seen why someone would buy a 300-page book to obtain a Wikipedia understanding of Rhys’s life.

The author does a serviceable job of depicting the most notable occurrences of Rhys’s early years in the British colony of Dominica, where she was brought up by a disinterested mother in a land rife with racial tension. But Pizzichini is relatively artless in showing Rhys’s discomfort as a white woman among former slaves. Pizzichini refers to the island’s population as “swarthy” and rushes through Rhys’s feelings about Black people:

One the one hand she envied them, on the other she feared them. She was entrenched in stereotypes […] Yet she knew that they hated because they had been hated. Although they laughed loud and long, she noticed they seldom smiled.

This disjointed quality is characteristic of Pizzichini’s prose, which will offend grammar snobs with its syntactical slip-ups. (“Her father, apart from the nuns, had been forgotten.”)

The book report style persists as Pizzichini follows Rhys to London through her stint as a student and chorus girl, where she goes from penniless to courted by male admirers with clothes, flowers, and money. Although the novels and stories are only occasionally referenced in Pizzichini’s work, it’s clear that Rhys’s personal experiences seeped into every book– her fashion choices, unpleasant run-ins with other women, financial struggles, and affairs. Rhys may have been her own best biographer, not in her memoir but in her fiction, which captures the strange pains and joys of living a life largely dependent on male patronage. One of Pizzichini’s strengths is how she parallels the content of Rhys's narratives and life. But her depiction remains lifeless.

Ultimately, The Blue Hour’s downfall isn’t a lack of information or research; it’s the dullness with which they’re recounted. We’re given occasional asides about the prevailing styles or social codes of the day, but we never fully enter another place and time. We’re told how Rhys feels, but we don’t experience it ourselves or even sympathize with it. When Pizzichini writes “she often found that when she told people her story, they looked at her with disbelief in their eyes,” countless feminist readers will feel an instant kinship with Rhys. It’s a shame that the rest of the book will dismantle much of it.

Written by: Monica Shores, September 20th 2009

Romanian Names

admin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:22:00 +0000

By John Vanderslice

Dead Oceans

John Vanderslice has mellowed with age. He’s still capable of writing catchy songs with narrative lyrics, but the delivery is now softer and less electronically embellished. Compared to earlier exuberant offerings like Cellar Door _(2004) and _Life and Death Of An American Four-Tracker(2002), Romanian Names is restrained, even provincial. But in standard Vanderslice style, this latest album traffics in what might be called the Wes Anderson spectrum of emotions: melancholy, muted joy, and occasional good cheer.

Previous album openers, like “Pale Horse” from Cellar Door, announced their arrival with energetic pounding and reigned in noise; but Romanian Names kicks off with “Tremble and Tear,” an optimistic sing-along without much going on in the lyrics (“Here comes the one/Yeah she’s the one”). The subsequent tracks follow in its likeable footsteps: “C & O Canal” chugs happily along like a children’s song, complete with a “la la la” section, while “Fetal Horses” is a striking mix of beguiling, pretty melody with intensely morbid lyrics. But the momentum of the album’s opening dissolves with “Too Much Time,” a slow, surging piece with all the markings of a dénouement, albeit a moving and evocative one.

The disappointment in the latter half of the record is that the songs don’t build much power. “Forest Knoll” falls flat while meditating on our modern inability to hunt our own food, and the closer “Hard Times” simply isn’t compelling enough to be an affecting lament, no matter how hard the string section tries to make you care. In “Oblivion,” Vanderslice complains “can’t write a song/strap the capo on,” leaving the listener to wonder how many of these were churned out with frustration.

There’s no single arresting or insistent song to anchor what is ultimately a collection of acceptable, but forgettable pieces. Don’t expect to be seized with a need to repeat a particular track with the exception of “Sunken Union Boat,” which vies with the dark and unexpected “Summer Stock” for standout song.

Written by: Monica Shores, September 19th 2009

The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into The Far Realms Of Lust And Longing

admin — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:43:00 +0000

By Daniel Bergner

ECCO Books

Daniel Bergner’s new work on sexuality, The Other Side of Desire, garnered a considerable amount of press before it was released thanks to an adapted excerpt from the book published in the New York Times under the title, “What Do Women Want?” Many feminists were disgruntled by the piece, which included University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) professor Marta Meana’s insistence of narcissism in the role of female arousal. (“Being desired is the orgasm.”) As one NYT letter writer pointed out, “For many women, it’s occasionally hard to know the difference between sexual agency and male-driven definitions of sexiness[...] we are not ‘post feminist’ yet.”

In the book itself, Bergner examines four distinct case studies of individuals with non-normative sexual proclivities, including a foot fetishist struggling with debilitating shame, a man who propositioned his adolescent stepdaughter, and an unrepentant female sadist who openly rejects the “safe, sane, consensual” mantra of the Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism (BDSM) community. Bergner alternates within each section between intimate portraits of his subjects’ lives and feedback from psychologists and psychiatrists who provide their professional take on the situation.

The female sadist is by far the most articulate subject and her chapter is subsequently the most memorable. Her practices are intense, and, to his credit, Bergner presents her actions to us without apparent judgment. The book’s greatest strength is the author’s willingness to admit moments when his own sensibilities are challenged and then do his best to set those reactions aside and continue reporting. What his interviewees confess is often stunningly honest, and the best way to respect their candidness is to simply share it.

The book ends on a weak note with “The Devotee,” a section focused on an amputee fetishist, Ron, and his amputee wife Laura. While Bergner touches on the ways disabled individuals’ sexuality is neglected (the doctors never address what sex might be like after Laura’s accident nor do they inform of the existence of a devotee community), he doesn’t linger on the subject for long. He also abandons his strategy of providing medical insight as a counterpoint to the personal experience and instead becomes strangely caught up in describing the artwork of Hans Bellmer, a man who photographed damaged-looking dolls, and Ron’s own photographs of amputees.

While Bergner does an admirable job of conveying the eroticism some men experience in sex with a disabled woman, his writing at this stage is often overly dramatic: “The body parts were letters, and their violent reordering would reinvent the body’s language and unmask its messages and lead to shaman’s wisdom.” Furthermore, there seems to be little room for Laura’s sexual needs in the relationship. She wonders what she can offer a man now after losing her conventional beauty in an accident. Once she begins modeling as an amputee her confidence is somewhat restored, yet she still doubts she could ever attract a “normal” man. It seems that Laura, like many women, grew up substituting being desired by a man in place of any desires of her own. Ron’s tastes are catered to, but Laura’s? As readers, we’re never entirely sure what she wants. Perhaps that New York Times letter writer was on to something.

Written by: Monica Shores, May 4th 2009