See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  Besides their alma mater, these three chums have one thing in common: they’ve lost men, spirit, money, and time to their old college acquaintance, Zenia. At various times, and in various emotional disguises, Zenia has insinuated her way into their lives and practically demolished them. Charming and gorgeous, Zenia is a misogynist’s grotesque: relentlessly seductive, brutal, pathologically dishonest. Her past is unclear and fictitious: she alternately passes herself off as the orphaned daughter of White Russians, or Romanian Gypsies, or Berlin Jews. Sometimes she is broke. Sometimes she is dying of cancer. Sometimes she is a journalist doing research, and sometimes she is a freelance spy, part of some international espionage caper. To Tony, who almost lost her husband and jeopardized her academic career, Zenia is “a lurking enemy commando.” To Roz, who did lose her husband and almost her magazine, Zenia is “a cold and treacherous bitch.” To Charis, who lost a boyfriend, quarts of vegetable juice, and some pet chickens, Zenia is a kind of zombie, maybe “soulless”: “There must be people like that around, because there are more humans alive on the earth right now than have ever lived, altogether, since humans began, and if souls are recycled then there must be some people alive today who didn’t get one, sort of like musical chairs.”

  Yet oddly, for all her inscrutable evil, Zenia is what drives this book: she is impossibly, fantastically bad. She is pure theater, pure plot. She is Richard III with breast implants. She is Iago in a miniskirt. She manipulates and exploits all the vanities and childhood scars of her friends (wounds left by neglectful mothers, an abusive uncle, absent dads); she grabs at intimacies and worms her way into their comfortable lives, then starts swinging a pickax. She mobilizes all the wily and beguiling art of seduction and ingratiation, which she has been able to use on men, and she directs it at women as well. She is an autoimmune disorder. She is viral, self-mutating, opportunistic (the narrative discusses her in conjunction with AIDS, salmonella, and warts). She is a “man-eater” run amok. Roz thinks: “Women don’t want all the men eaten up by man-eaters; they want a few left over so they can eat some themselves.”

  Yet almost everything that happens, happens because of Zenia, and so the reader gets interested and waits to see what Zenia will do. (When she seems to have died, the Rasputin-like Zenia comes back to life. What next?) That we never actually figure her out, or understand the mysterious, cartoonish extremity of her pathology, or even for a moment get her point of view is disappointing. For like Iago and Richard, she is no idiot. And, surrounded by boobs and chumps or even routine civility, she can feast like a shark. But she never gets her own aria or soliloquy, not really; she remains unsolved, unknown.

  * * *

  —

  Perhaps Atwood intended Zenia, by the end, to be a symbol of all that is inexplicably evil: war, disease, global catastrophe. Zenia is meant to have no voice of her own: she is only a mad reworking of everyone else’s. But an otherwise terrific story suffers for this particular suspense, one that only resolves itself in a kind of narrative hash. In its pacing and staging Atwood’s conclusion is goofy, jerky, madcap—though certainly entertaining. The endings of her novels always seem to have perplexed and defeated Atwood, and in The Robber Bride she self-consciously throws up her hands: “Every ending is arbitrary,” she writes, a little lamely, “because the end is where you write The end.”

  Still, The Robber Bride is as smart as anything Atwood has written, and she is always smart. (In the Grimms’ story “The Robber Bridegroom,” the clever heroine saves herself by telling a dream, a story, a fiction that contains the truth.) In The Robber Bride, Atwood has avoided the entomological listing of recollected detail that made up so much of her last novel, Cat’s Eye, yet she retains her gift for observing, in poetry, the minutiae specific to the physical and emotional lives of her characters. A black leather suit makes Tony “look like an avant-garde Italian umbrella stand.” The neon of Toronto “gives off a glow, like an amusement park or something safely on fire.”

  What’s more, the novel opens with what may be the most eloquent and quintessential image of a woman in the late twentieth century (despite the great variety!): a working woman (Tony) in early morning, wearing only slippers and a dressing gown, frantically chases after a garbage truck, plastic bag in hand, because her husband (feckless though subsequently contrite) “is supposed to do the garbage, but he forgets.”

  (1993)

  On Writing

  Recently I received a letter from an acquaintance in which he said, “By the way, I’ve been following and enjoying your work. It’s getting better: deeper and sicker.”

  Because the letter was handwritten, I convinced myself, for a portion of the day, that perhaps the last word was richer. But then I picked up the letter and looked at the word again: there was the s, there was the k. There was no denying it. Even though denial had been my tendency of late. I had recently convinced myself that a note I’d received from an ex-beau (in what was a response to my announcement that I’d gotten married) had read “Best Wishes for Oz.” I considered this an expression of bitterness on my ex-beau’s part, a snide lapse, a doomed man’s view of marriage, and it gave me great satisfaction. Best Wishes for Oz. Eat your heart out, I thought. You had your chance. Cry me a river. Later, a friend, looking at the note, pointed out, Look: This isn’t an O. This is a 9—see the tail? And this isn’t a Z. This is a 2. This says 92. “Best wishes for 92.” It hadn’t been cryptic bitterness at all—only an indifferent little New Year’s greeting. How unsatisfying!

  So now when I looked at the deeper and richer, I knew I had to be careful not to misread wishfully. The phrase wasn’t, finally, deeper and richer; it was deeper and sicker. My work was deeper and sicker.

  What did that mean, sicker, and why or how might this adjective be applied in a friendly manner? I wasn’t sure. But it brought me to thinking of the things that I had supposed fiction was supposed to be, what art was supposed to be, what writers and artists were supposed to do, and whether it could possibly include some aesthetics of sickness.

  * * *

  —

  I think it’s a common thing for working writers to go a little blank when asking themselves too many fundamental questions about what it is they’re doing. Some of this has to do with the lost perspective that goes with being so immersed. And some of it has to do with just plain not having a clue. Of course, this is the curse of the grant application for instance, which includes that hilarious part called the project description (describe in detail the book you are going to write), wherein you are asked to know the unknowable, and if you don’t, then just to say it anyway for cash. That a grant-giving agency would trust a specific and detailed description from a fiction writer seems sweetly naïve—though fiction writers are also allowed to file their own taxes, write their own parents, sign their own checks, raise their own children—so it is a tolerant and generous or at least innocent world here and there.

  What writers do is workmanlike: tenacious, skilled labor. That we know. But it is also mysterious. And the mystery involved in the act of creating a narrative is attached to the mysteries of life itself, and the creation of life itself: that we are; that there is something rather than nothing. Though I wonder whether it sounds preposterous in this day and age to say such a thing. No one who has ever looked back upon a book she or he has written, only to find the thing foreign and alienating, unrecallable, would ever deny its mysteriousness. One can’t help but think that in some way this surprise reflects the appalled senility of God herself, or himself, though maybe it’s the weirdly paired egotism and humility of artists that leads them over and over again to this creational cliché: that we are God’s dream, God’s characters; that literary fiction is God’s compulsion handed down to us, an echo, a diminishment, but something we are made to do in imitation, perhaps even in honor, of that original creation, and made to do in understanding of what flimsy vapors we all are—though also how heartbreaking and amusing. In more
scientific terms, the compulsion to read and write—and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion—is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

  For it’s crucial to keep ourselves, as a species, interested in ourselves. When that goes, we tip into the void, we harden to rock, we blow away and disappear. Art has been given to us to keep us interested and engaged—rather than distracted by materialism or sated with boredom—so that we can attach to this life, a life which might, otherwise, be an unbearable one.

  * * *

  —

  And so, perhaps, it is this compulsion to keep ourselves interested that can make the work seem, well, a little sick (I’m determined, you see, if not to read sicker as richer then at least to read sicker as okay). Certainly so much of art originates and locates itself within the margins—that is, the contours—of the human self, as a form of locating and defining that self. And certainly art, and the life of the artist, requires a goodly amount of shamelessness. The route to truth and beauty is a toll road—tricky and unpretty in and of itself.

  But are the impulses toward that journey pathological ones?

  I took inventory of my own life.

  As a child, I had done things that now seem like clues indicating I was headed for a life that was not quite normal—one that was perhaps “artistic.” I detached things: the charms from bracelets, the bows from dresses. This was a time—the early sixties, an outpost, really, of the fifties—when little girls’ dresses had lots of decorations: badly stitched appliqué, or little plastic berries, lace flowers, satin bows. I liked to remove them and would often then reattach them—on a sleeve or a mitten. I liked to recontextualize even then—one of the symptoms. Other times, I would just collect these little detached things and play with them, keeping them in a wooden bowl in a dresser drawer in my room. If my dresses had been denuded, made homely, it didn’t matter to me: I had a supply of lovely gewgaws in a bowl. I had begun a secret life. A secret harvest. I had begun perhaps a kind of literary life—one that would continue to wreak havoc on my wardrobe, but, alas, those are the dues. I had become a magpie, collecting shiny objects. I was a starling in reverse: harboring a nest of eggs gathered from here and there.

  When I was a little older, say eleven or twelve, I used to sit on my bed with a sketch pad, listening to the songs on the radio. Each song would last three to four minutes, and during that time, I would draw the song: I would draw the character I imagined was singing the song, and the setting that character was in—usually there were a lot of waves and seagulls, docks and coastlines. I lived in the mountains, away from the ocean, but a babysitter I’d had when I was nine had taught me how to draw lighthouses, so I liked to stick in a lighthouse whenever possible. After one song was over, I’d turn the page and draw the next one, filling notebooks this way. I was obsessed with songs—songs and letters (I had a pen pal in Canada)—and I often think that that is what I tried to find later in literature: the feeling of a song; the friendly, confiding voice of a letter but the cadence and feeling of a song. When a piece of prose hit rhythms older, more familiar and enduring than itself, it seemed then briefly to belong to nature, or at least to the world of music, and that’s when it seemed to me “artistic” and good.

  I exhibited other signs of a sick life—a strange, elaborate crush on Bill Bixby, a belief in a fairy godmother, also a bit of journalism my brother and I embarked on called Mad Man Magazine, which consisted of our writing on notebook paper a lot of articles we’d make up about crazy people, especially crazy people in haunted houses, then tying the pages together with ribbon and selling them to family members for a nickel. But it was a life of the imagination.

  When I was older, I suppose there were other signs of sickness. I preferred hearing about parties to actually going to them. I liked to phone the next day and get the news from a friend. I wanted gossip, third-handedness, narrative. My reading was scattered, random, unsystematic. I wasn’t one of those nice teenage girls who spent their summers reading all of Jane Austen. My favorite books were The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Such Good Friends by Lois Gould. Later, like so many (of the “afflicted”), I discovered the Brontës. One enters these truly great, truly embarrassing books like a fever dream—in fact, fever dreams figure prominently in them. They are situated in sickness, and unafraid of that. And that’s what made them wonderful to me. They were at the center of something messy. But they didn’t seem foreign in the least. In fact, very little written by a woman seemed foreign to me. Books by women came as great friends, a relief. They showed up on the front lawn and waved. Books by men one had to walk a distance to get to, take a hike to arrive at, though as readers we girls were all well trained for the hike and we didn’t learn to begrudge and resent it until later. A book by a woman, a book that began up close, on the heart’s porch, was a treat, an exhilaration, and finally, I think, that is why women who became writers did so: to create more books in the world by women, to give themselves something more to read.

  When I first started writing, I often felt sorry for men, especially white men, for it seemed the reasons for their becoming writers were not so readily apparent, or compelling, but had to be searched for, even made excuses for. Though their quote-unquote tradition was so much more celebrated and available, it was also more filled up. It was ablaze. What did a young male writer feel he was adding? As a woman, I never felt that. There seemed to be a few guiding lights (I, of course, liked the more demented ones—Sexton, Plath, McCullers), but that was enough. Admiration and enthusiasm and a sense of scarcity: inspiration without the anxiety of influence.

  I feel a little less like that now, in part because I know the main struggle for every writer is with the dance and limitations of language—to honor the texture of it but also to make it unafraid. One must throw all that one is into language, like a Christmas tree hurled into a pool. One must listen and proceed, sentence to sentence, hearing what comes next in one’s story—which can be a little maddening. It can be like trying to understand a whisper in a foreign accent: Did she say Je t’adore or Shut the door?

  To make the language sing while it works is a task to one side of gender. How often I’ve tried to shake from my own storytelling the phrase And then suddenly, as if I could wake up a story with the false drama of those three words. It’s usually how I know my writing’s going badly; I begin every sentence that way: And then suddenly he went to the store. And then suddenly the store was brick. And then suddenly he had been asleep for eight hours. The writer marries the language, said Auden, and out of this marriage writing is born. But what if the language feels inadequate, timid, recalcitrant, afraid? I often think of the Albert Goldbarth poem “Alien Tongue,” wherein the poet thinks wistfully, adulterously of an imagined language parsed to such a thinness that there is a tense that means “I would have, if I’d been my twin.” What an exquisite, precision tool such a tense would be for a writer! Whole rooms could be added to scenes; whole paragraphs to pages; books to books; sequels where at first there were no sequels….But then excessive literary production, George Eliot reminds us, is a social offense. As far as language goes we have to live contentedly, and discontentedly, with our own, making it do what it can and, also, a little of what it can’t. And this contradiction brings one back, I suppose, to a makeshift aesthetics of sickness.

  * * *

  —

  Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one’s life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable. Even in the luckiest life, for example, one loves someone and then that someone dies. This is not acceptable. This is a major design flaw! To say nothing of the world’s truly calamitous lives. The imag
ination is meant outwardly to console us with all that is interesting, not so much to subtract but to add to our lives. It reminds me of a progressive Italian elementary school I read of once in which the classrooms had two dress-up areas with trunks of costumes—just in case, while studying math or plants, a child wanted to be in disguise that day.

  But the imagination also forces us inward. It constructs inwardly from what has entered our inwardness. The best art, especially literary art, embraces the very idea of paradox: it sees opposites, antitheses coexisting. It sees the blues and violets in a painting of an orange; it sees the scarlets and the yellows in a bunch of Concord grapes. In narrative, tones share space—often queasily, the ironies quivering. Consider these lines from the Alice Munro story “A Real Life”: “Albert’s heart had given out—he had only had time to pull to the side of the road and stop the truck. He died in a lovely spot, where black oaks grew in a bottomland, and a sweet, clear creek ran beside the road.” Or these lines from a Garrison Keillor monologue: “And so he tasted it, and a look of pleasure came over him, and then he died. Ah, life is good. Life is good.” What constitutes tragedy and what constitutes comedy may be a fuzzy matter. The comedienne Joan Rivers has said that there isn’t any suffering that’s one’s own that isn’t also potentially very funny. Delmore Schwartz claimed that the only way anyone could understand Hamlet was to assume right from the start that all the characters were roaring drunk. I often think of an acquaintance of mine who is also a writer and whom I ran into once in a bookstore. We exchanged hellos, and when I asked her what she was working on these days, she said, “Well, I was working on a long comic novel, but then in the middle of the summer my husband had a terrible accident with an electric saw and lost three of his fingers. It left us so sad and shaken that when I returned to writing, my comic novel kept getting droopier and sadder and depressing. So I scrapped it, and started writing a novel about a man who loses three fingers in an accident with a saw, and that,” she said, “that’s turning out to be really funny.”