by Lorrie Moore
If Suzzy Roche were to sit down and write a novel that was not about music and family, what a disappointment that would be. But not to worry: her charming and agile literary debut, Wayward Saints, has as its protagonist a famous musician named Mary Saint, who is finally going home to Swallow, New York, the small town where she grew up, in order to give a concert there. She will as well reunite with her mother and dedicate to her the (fictional) rock hit “Sewer Flower,” whose Rochean lyrics include “she grew out of cow dung and a dirty little song was sung” (Roche herself has written a song to go along with the novel—“It’s what you are / not what you ain’t / you’re a wayward saint”). Whether Mary deigns to lay eyes on her father, who terrorized her childhood and is now sitting quietly in a nursing home, remains to be seen.
Despite the broken family that forms the emotional backdrop of her tale, Roche’s descriptions are emphatically familial: not only are friends a family, glimpsed deer are a family, and trees are a family. “Far into the woods, back behind the camp, stood a circle of evergreen trees and most days I wound up there. Now I know that those trees were actually a family, and I’ll tell you how I know that, too. I must have sensed it because I liked to sit right in the middle of their circle and sing.” Sisterly beams of light shine down in slanted columns: the stage is set and lit by nature. In this transcendental setting Roche’s heroine, Mary Saint, also experiences a vision of the “Other Mary”: “She told me that all the slanted beams of light belonged to her, and not to God, and she also let me in on the secret about the trees being a family.”
A mystic Catholicism haunts the book’s pages, as do more pagan gods. The narrative’s guiding of her heroine home for her concert is gingerly and mythic, as if Mary Saint, with her dark celebrity, were a kind of Eurydice, who has been kidnapped into some unknowable world ruled by devil fame, and who might not complete the journey out if the anxious loved ones turn expectantly and look with too much eagerness. It is ironic that the mother who awaits, gazes and gazes without ever properly seeing. She looks at her daughter with the same flummoxed perplexity that any mother of a rock star might. “The two women sat looking up at the moon and stars. Mary pointed out the different constellations to her mother, and although Jean couldn’t really see the shapes, she told Mary that she could.” Those lines are this warmly matter-of-fact book’s nimble benediction: a mother’s incomprehension, a daughter’s mystery, the heavens looking on. Can we get an Amen.
(2012)
Lena Dunham
Is it the partially handheld camera or the partially handheld life that makes one woozy when watching the bold and talented Lena Dunham, whose much-anticipated show, Girls, will air on April 15? In Tiny Furniture, her award-winning house-of-mirrors film, Dunham wrote a script starring her family and friends, most of them playing the people they somewhat are in real life, but with different names. And despite the privilege of these Manhattan lives, the mood of the film, especially as it attempts to portray young quasi adults in postcollege purgatory, is sometimes so depressing—often the way a clown (e.g., Charlie Chaplin, Joan Rivers, Stephen Colbert) can be depressing, and I do think Dunham has clown aspirations—that one does not know always where to look.
The youthful sex of educated, family-funded drifters that Dunham puts on the screen is mostly heartless and degrading, and not remotely exuberant, which is her point. One imagines that Dunham is hoping you’ll also find it funny, but in middle-aged viewers a protective, parental feeling toward these young people might make this impossible. The writer Rebecca Mead has referred to the sex scenes in Tiny Furniture as “dispiriting,” which seems to be only the tip of Dunham’s psychosexual iceberg. It looks like careless cruelty between nudists. Which may be what life in one’s early twenties often is, and if we have forgotten, Dunham means to remind us. But, in compensatory fashion, there is cute homoerotic flirtation among Dunham and her female friends to warm and console.
Dunham’s mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, known for her work with miniature décor, plays the mother, Siri, in Tiny Furniture. Dunham plays the daughter Aura, and Dunham’s real-life sister, Grace, plays Aura’s teenage sister. In their two-tubbed bathroom in a giant Tribeca loft (their actual home) the two women artists, mother and daughter, are sometimes seen soaking simultaneously across from each other, as if they were reflections. Aura has discovered Siri’s diaries from when she was Aura’s age, and they mirror many of Aura’s own preoccupations with love, her identity as an artist, and soothing her general worry about her destiny. (These are Laurie Simmons’s real-life journals.) “Did you ever have a job that wasn’t taking pictures of stupid tiny crap?” the employment-challenged Aura yells at Siri. As artist-mother (and artist’s mother) Siri seems less “preoccupied,” as some reviewers have written, than deeply tired. Her grown daughters are beyond-their-years starved for her attention and approval, competing with each other to sleep in her bed—where Mom is mostly, well, trying to get some sleep.
The title Tiny Furniture refers explicitly to the artwork that Siri makes at home, as well as to the ways in which—as the film follows Aura to jobs, trysts, and parties in the months immediately following her graduation from college into an unwelcoming economy—replication is utilized in art, and reality is reduced to plaything. It also seems to refer to the film’s Alice in Wonderland quality. Almost every character seems a study in some kind of mental illness, and, as when Alice devours the Eat Me cake, the furniture can grow suddenly tiny around Aura—who looms large in her own mind, though, to her credit, she seems always game and rarely defeated, despite all. She almost never says no.
Lena Dunham, as she has said herself, despite her self-involvement, knows no vanity. (While at Oberlin, she made an unflattering video of herself in a bikini and posted it on YouTube, where it received over 5 million hits and many scathing comments.) She is boundaryless in a way that is a little TMI in life but has its dangerous thrills in narrative art; if some of it includes pointless invasions of privacy (people in the bathroom), mostly we don’t notice or care. Are Lena Dunham and her world as preciously interesting as she hopes? Strangely, yes.
Thus Judd Apatow joined her in making an HBO series, which became Girls. The show seems very much an extension of her film, utilizing some of the same cast members, although here Lena is named Hannah and lives in Brooklyn, and her parents are neither artists nor New Yorkers, but professors who live out of town and would like to pull the plug on the cash flow that has been supporting their daughter for two years. In one of the tense family scenes at which Dunham excels, Hannah’s mother declares, “We can’t keep bankrolling your groovy lifestyle.”
“I am busy trying to become who I am,” Hannah argues, requesting $1,100 a month to live on. She is working on a memoir. She believes she may be the voice of her generation. Or rather, “a voice of a generation.”
“I’ve worked very hard,” counters her mother, thinking of her own retirement. “I want to sit by a fucking lake.”
“I could be a drug addict. Do you realize how lucky you are?” says Hannah—words I have heard in my very own house.
“You’re being played by a major fucking player,” her mother warns her father.
* * *
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There is a history of television comedies about young women triumphantly taking on the big city. That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, seems out of memory-reach for the world of Dunham’s show, but both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Sex and the City are explicitly referenced in the script—and explicitly subverted. These older shows were laughably fake in their depictions of city girls: they were designed to buck up women viewers, to give them pretty bachelorettes who were stumbling but still smiling. Marlo Thomas’s effervescent Ann Marie twirls a parasol at Lincoln Center and flies a kite in Central Park and generally postpones indefinitely marriage to her loyal boyfriend, Donald. Mary Tyler Moore, with no beau at all, tosses her hat in the air with unrepressed chipperness (in the opening c
redits of That Girl, Marlo Thomas appears to be weathering stronger breezes and hangs on to hers). These programs from the sixties and seventies were far more conventionally feminist than Sex and the City, paying closer attention to a young woman’s professional efforts than to her shopping and dating. But they did not dare present real unhappiness, or real anything at all.
In the opening montage of That Girl, Marlo Thomas sees a twinned version of herself in a store window, and the mannequin looks down and gives her a you-go-girl wink. There is a bit of this narcissistic wink in Dunham’s work, without which it might be unwatchable. And I mean unwatchable in the very best way. “You couldn’t pay me enough to be twenty-four again,” says Hannah’s doctor, examining her patient for an STD. Dunham has teleported herself into the future in order to see herself as a survivor—a presurvivor, not yet quite survived—of a terrible time. It’s what true comedic artists do.
(2012)
Wisconsin Recall
The attempt to recall Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker (and several state legislators), which culminates in Tuesday’s recall election, began two emotionally bitter winters ago. A piece of Walker-sponsored legislation known as Act 10 was put forward without much public warning: it was a proposal that, among other things, increased state employees’ contribution to health care (a substantial cut in their take-home pay) and removed public workers’ collective bargaining rights (an exception being made for police and firemen, who had supported Walker’s campaign). Shoved forward during a February thaw, Act 10 was thought to be shrewdly if mischievously timed—a Friday!—but it backfired. The weather was sunny and warm for winter and rally organization began that weekend: Madisonians, a huge portion of whom work in some way for the public sector—not only teachers but sanitation workers, prison guards, and hospital staff—took to the street and marched on the capitol, occupying it for months, while joined by people from all over the state, as well as by Susan Sarandon and Jesse Jackson.
At that time, the protests were full of surprising unity, even between protesters and police, who would high-five one another in a friendly manner despite the cops being on duty. All was nonviolent. Farmers drove their tractors around Capitol Square, parents brought their children to show them what civil disobedience looked like, taking photos of the kids holding Recall signs. Teachable moments as family outings were everywhere. Microphones were set up, speeches were given, music was played, chants were chanted, pizza was delivered, drums were drummed. For weeks people clapped, shouted, and danced. By St. Patrick’s Day the feeling of angry campout and festival was still in the air, though there were more leprechaun costumes and some of the chants had been hijacked by teenage interlopers: Hear it loud, hear it clear, we want union rights and beer. Nonetheless, it became a source of local civic pride that the protests seemed a direct prompt to the subsequent Occupy Wall Street Movement. Some Madisonians would claim the Arab Spring as well. Scott Walker took to wearing a bulletproof vest.
Despite the assertion by journalist David Brooks (and others) that Americans live in more like-minded communities than ever before and are therefore cut off from values and opinions at variance with their own, more than a year later Wisconsin’s recall of its governor and several legislators is now said to have pitted neighbor against neighbor. It is being called “a civil war,” and as in our American Civil War some family members are not talking to other family members. Despite a history of bipartisanship, people have chosen sides (as midwesterners tend to do in divorce; not for them the pseudosophisticated friends-with-all approach). Tales of confrontation abound: a driver with a RECALL WALKER bumper sticker might be tailed on the highway then passed in the adjacent lane by someone holding up a FUCK THE RECALL sign.
There have been calls for civility and healing as well as for further debate. Days before Mother’s Day, on the eve of the Democratic primary to choose Walker’s opponent in the recall, Kathleen Falk, the former Dane County Executive who had been one of the first candidates out there, garnering union and environmentalists’ endorsements but mysteriously considered “unelectable” even by her admirers, said the state was crying out for “a mother’s touch.” It was not her finest moment. But when she said “a budget is a moral document” she was back on track.
The widely considered “more electable” Milwaukee mayor, Tom Barrett, who defeated Falk in the primary, has been defeated by Walker before, in the 2010 gubernatorial election, so what constitutes electability for the Democrats is a little fuzzy. Barrett was said to have run a lackluster campaign in 2010, but luster is still not his strong suit: he remains stolid and mild and intelligent, perhaps temperamentally unsuited for campaign life, though he can do fieriness if absolutely necessary. Everyone is slightly in drag: Barrett, the people’s mayor of Milwaukee, is chiseled, handsome, and dignified in an almost regal way; in a rally with Bill Clinton, even while costumed in a Milwaukee Brewers jacket, the very tall, polite Barrett made the crowd-pleasing Clinton look like a raspy, wispy tough guy.
Meanwhile, Scott Walker, in public debates, looks sleepy, even a bit cross-eyed. To study his notes in a televised debate he bows his head so low that viewers see his bald spot in back. The pose looks almost like shame. But when he lifts his head up again he becomes magically fast-talking. Since Walker never graduated from college, in public settings he plays his Eagle Scout card in a way that impressed even me, though I know the Eagle Scouts boast a bunch of unlikely suspects (among them, the film director David Lynch). With Barrett and Walker facing each other down, the recall election has the look of a rematch, although Democrats have consistently said it is not. With Barrett behind in the polls, the recall also has the sad-making whiff of futility.
In phrasing handed to him by someone on his campaign, Barrett has declared himself “rock solid” while Walker is the “rock star” of the national right wing. (Walker blames the left for “starting it”—“it” being the state’s affairs going national—with activist movie stars, union support, and continual media coverage last winter.) In addition to his right-wing, right-to-work policies, Walker’s out-of-state speaking engagements are an issue, as is his quest for a national profile, especially since it has involved the unprecedented accrual of out-of-state cash. At another moment in time this might be a genuine sticking point in the traditional midwestern who-do-you-think-you-are? psyche, but voters may care less about Walker being a “rock star” than Barrett’s campaign managers are hoping. It is not the most stirring theme to run on.
There can be a begrudging provincial respect for someone in the national eye, even if it’s the eye of a storm, and of the Tea Party, and of the out-of-state billionaires who have helped fill Walker’s campaign coffers, which are now up to $31 million—an unprecedented amount in Wisconsin political history. Walker, who last year fell prey to a taped prank phone call from a blogger pretending to be one of the Koch brothers, is now using Koch cash to run Willie Horton–style ads, the most recent featuring a photograph of a dead Milwaukee toddler (somehow blaming Barrett’s law enforcement team).
Barrett, partly because of recall rules that limit a challenger’s resources, has no such national money. But to insistently call Walker a “rock star” may exalt Walker more than is understood by the Barrett campaign, which is hoping for the mythic Wisconsin wholesomeness to prevail at the polls. Certainly corruption seems to surround Walker and he has a criminal defense fund already in place—the first time a sitting governor has ever had one. Rumors of indictments are in the air, regarding both Walker’s time as Milwaukee County executive and his current use of state moneys. But many people in self-contradictory Wisconsin, the home of both the Progressive Party and Joe McCarthy, may not care very deeply about the charges against Walker.
As the state struggles financially, and Walker and his Republican henchmen in the legislature attempt to bestow both tax and environmental breaks on “job-creating” open-pit mining companies, while rejecting $810 million of Obama stimulus money for a hi
gh-speed train, the town-gown-style split that has always existed along various fault lines across the state has reemerged, this time cutting through small-town neighborhoods, Indian tribal land, and even academic departments. Wisconsin has long been considered a collective of liberal college communities connected by interstates crisscrossing the farmland. But especially with the rise of suburban sprawl, it has become much more unpredictable than that.
If Walker wins, the sorrow of so much grass-roots political effort coming to naught will be profound. From “Obama Nation to Abomination” quipped local radio-show host Michael Feldman, though the extent to which the recall election is also a referendum on the Obama presidency is unclear. A June election, its timing determined by recall rules, is not a November one. Over 100,000 students have dispersed for the academic year—many are out of state for the summer; some entering freshmen have yet to turn eighteen. Wisconsin has a long history as a swing state: in 2000 Al Gore won it by only 6,000 votes, and if Florida had been successfully contested, Bush was going to demand a Wisconsin recount; in 2004 John Kerry took Wisconsin by only 16,000.
Despite this, and despite the Republican legislature’s newly stringent voter ID laws, Wisconsin could still be Obama’s. But it won’t be the comfortable margin of 2008. Well, the whole world is watching—sort of. If only the whole state were voting.
(2012)
Richard Ford’s Canada
Richard Ford is a writer of jangling personal fascination to many in the literary world. Charming and charmed, he is an embodiment of interesting and intimidating contradictions: a southern childhood, a midwestern education, a restless adulthood occurring not just in New York and New Jersey but in seemingly every state whose name begins with M (or L). Brief stints in law school and the Marines (and an application to the CIA). Wanderlust and a knack for real estate. The Irish-American southerner’s gift of gab. The belligerent responses to book reviews, the poor spelling, the beautiful French, the mercurial temperament, the indelible child characters from someone with no children at all. He cuts a transfixing figure for even an ordinary reader’s curiosity: the book-jacket photographs with their silvery bronze patina suggesting a pale-eyed cattle rustler, his laser-blue gaze smudged simultaneously with apprehension and derring-do, a Tin Woodman tint evoking a man of metal and mettle, in sorrowful quest of his forgotten heart.
