Exploring Identity: Book Club #2
I have well-worn grooves in my reading history. Just like I have meals or clothes or television series I enjoy going back to over and over again, there are types of stories that I gravitate towards.
My literary comfort zone is some amalgamation of sprawling epics detailing the web of connections between a group of people and/or places (The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, Freedom by Jonathon Franzen, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdich, Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides), melancholy and deeply truthful bildungsromans (My Beautiful Friend by Elena Ferrente, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers [technically a memoir but a memoir is a bildungsroman at heart, right?]), historical and/or fantasy adventures featuring strong women (the Outlander series by Diana Galbaldon, the Alanna series by Tamora Pierce) and clever, fast-paced stories about women finding their place in the world (Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff). The thing that they all have in common is beautiful prose—rich prose dripping in allusion and metaphor and SAT words that inspires me as a writer, enlightens me as a reader, and educates me as a human. I like to wrap myself in what I read, and usually have little appreciation for anything that’s less than thick and enveloping (with the sole exception being the historical and/or fantasy novels—I’ll give up good prose for a good plot only in those instances).
(Side note: if I am ever profiled by a major periodical, I will only have two requests. First, that the incomparable and heroic Caity Weaver does the interview. Second, that she reads those 16 books before we do the interview, so she can go on a sped-up journey of how my personhood, psyche, and worldview were formed, and thus better understand me [and then, if she so desires, can use some of them for source material for to gently lampoon me with, as that is her style and, in adoring it, I willingly submit to it.])
But sometimes I want to climb out of my familiar pockets of literature and try something a little different. Last week, in which I split my time between the beautiful beaches of Punta del Este, Uruguay and the beautiful beaches of Punta del Diablo, Uruguay (we all have our own cross to bear), I read two books, one after the other, that were a change of pace, particularly in their more staccato writing style, and that, without my planning it, ended up digging into similar themes in extremely complementary ways.
So: I’m going to tell you about The First Bad Man by Miranda July and Hot Milk by Deborah Levy and encourage you to read them together. And then to call me and tell me what you thought about them because that’s what book club is all about!
First, our authors: July and Levy are both multi-hyphenate titans of creation. July is an American-born writer-director-actor-artist-musician-sculptor-app designer who has been fêted by such esteemed and elite harbingers of taste as the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award judges’ panel, The New Yorker, and now this blog. Levy is a British playwright-director-poet-novelist, also a Frank O’Connor Award winner, and a two-time Man Booker Prize shortlisted author. All this to say: I did not discover either of these women and I am not alone in loving them.
Reading Miranda July is a kinetic frenzy of an experience. Do you remember the Fruit Stripes gum popular in the 90s? Bright red, green, yellow, orange, pink-wrapped sticks with paper-thin temporary tattoos featuring that zany zebra mascot subbing in for the traditional waxy-paper gum wrapping? That’s how I experience July’s fiction: flashing, mightily flavorful in short bursts, unexpectedly and uniquely playful, leaving a surprisingly long, considering its brevity, mark on its reader.
The First Bad Man revolves around Cheryl Glickman, a single middle-aged woman who believes herself to be in a century-old love affair with a board member at the women’s self defense nonprofit that she works at (as Cheryl prepares herself for one of the limited interactions between her and the man she fancies herself the soulmate of, she imbues every action with the entirety of her eagerness to be with him: “I strolled through the parking garage and into the elevator, pressing 12 with a casual, fun-loving finger. The kind of finger that was up for anything.”1). She also sees herself as the protagonist in a strange eternal quest to reunite with the soul of a baby reincarnated to different women around her.
Her rich internal life is mightily interrupted by the arrival a long-term houseguest, her bosses’ twenty-year-old ditz of a daughter, Clee, who moves into Cheryl’s LA home and eventually into her heart. Cheryl slows her off-puttingly relatable inner observations (like explaining how she sends new employees home with a plant on their first day, so that on the inevitable future day that they’re crying and complaining about her to their spouses, they blame themselves versus Cheryl for their bad day—how could the nice manager who welcomed them with open arms and a hibiscus plant be at fault?2) in order to turn her sharp eye on Clee, who she sums up in possibly the best and harshest line of prose I’ve ever read: “Her personality was just a little piece of parsley decorating warm tawny haunches”3.
Cheryl’s affections cycle from her first love, the pedophilic board member, to her second, her voluptuous and abusive houseguest, and eventually and lastingly settle on the child of one and two. She explores identities as a straight woman, a lesbian, and a mother (and the overlapping Venn diagrams between those), and in each situation, July focuses on the connective tissues between selfhood and relationships. She has Cheryl continuously push herself from the links she’s forming in order to comment on the creation and dissolution of boundaries that make up all human relationships, capturing moments of astute observation of the inevitable sacrifice of self that precedes any joining:
On a date with the board member: “He said he hoped I liked sushi. I asked if he could point me toward the restroom. Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually entwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn’t be helped. We had a good run, me and me.”4
On losing Clee and the inevitable loss of all good things in life: “I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but the modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”5
On motherhood and its permanent effects: “A form of brainwashing, a process by with my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. it hurt. i tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me, just enough to warn other women with.”6
It is that final joining, between Cheryl and her adopted son, that strips open all relationships to their purest form: a process of mutual growth. In finding this identity of a mother—one she wears so much more comfortably than one of manager, of lover, of lesbian—July allows her to evolve, moving beyond her selfish rituals and into a place of empathy, of sacrifice, and of confidence. The rest of the novel falls away, too (including some of the rather gratuitous moments of clever double-nesting that feel like July either showing off or pushing the bounds of the novel, depending on how much you admire her), wrapping up quickly with Cheryl taking her son on a sunrise hike into the hills—a literal journey and a literal dawning that leaves us watching from a distance, waving at the receding form of July’s frank, dazzling, weird and wonderful prose.
Hot Milk starts with a journey, too, though by the time we meet main character Sofia Papastergiadis, she’s already arrived in Almería, a small Spanish fishing village, with her mother. Half-Greek Sofia and her very English mother are there to see Dr. Gómez, a pain specialist, in his very-expensive private practice whose white marble halls are a memorial to his dead wife and whose office houses such animal oddities as a stuffed marmot and a pregnant cat.
Sofia, an PhD-seeking anthropologist by training and a barista by job market opportunities and lack of follow-through, has much to observe there—the sarcophagus-as-house-of-healing, for one—and makes her notations quickly and deftly in Levy’s sharp prose from her vantage point of invalid’s nurse. Her mother is convinced that something is wrong with her feet, that some mysterious illness is keeping her wheelchair-bound despite the fact that she can occasionally, and usually only when Sofia isn’t looking, walk perfectly fine.
Perhaps as a result of her practice withdrawing to the edges in order to study the world, or perhaps because of her overbearing mother, the Sofia that begins the novel has no real sense of self (especially in comparison to July’s Cheryl, who believes herself to be the center of a dozen imagined dramas). She narrates herself as a literal object, a supporting figure in her mother’s quest: “On Monday, my mother will display her various symptoms to the consultant like an assortment of mysterious canapés. I will be holding the tray.”7 She imagines that it’s her who’s paralyzed, that her mother’s ailment is her own, too.
As the nontraditional Dr. Gómez takes her mother in for more tests and appointments, Sofia begins spending her time exploring the desert coast of Almería. She goes for a swim and is struck by medusas, both literally, warranting a trip to the medic tent, and figuratively, in the same way I was when I wrote about them a few weeks ago, warranting a reflection on the Spanish word for jellyfish, the Greek myth they share a name with, and her own Greek heritage, which she feels disconnected from since her father walked out on her and her mother when she was a baby.
Laying there filling out the patient intake form, Sofia begins reflecting on the blank spaces on the form and in her life, externalizing her thoughts to Juan, the soft-spoken bearded medic: “‘I don’t so much have an occupation as a preoccupation, which is my mother, Rose’”8 Juan, who remains a foil for Sofia throughout (perfectly bilingual to her stuttered Spanish and nonexistent Greek; hardworking to her lazy; etc., etc.), asks her over and over again how she is feeling, which leads her to her first revelation: “What I feel most is that I am a failure…I want a bigger life.”9
When Levy puts Sofia on a series of mini-quests—learn to drive stick, take a side trip to Athens to confront her father and her history with him without her mother’s influence—she takes us through them matter-of-factly, describing the bumpy Andalucian roads or the contours of her room at her father’s in the shorthand of an anthropologist jotting down notes (“The spare bedroom has no windows. It is stifling. The bed is a hard camping canvas bed.”10) It’s in the moments of self-identification and meaning-making that these quests invoke that Levy puts on a show with her language, testing the limits of Sofia’s categorical mind. Here is Sofia, comparing her life with the life of her new stepmother, only a few years older than herself and living a life in no way wants for herself: “I was flesh thrust desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.”11
The flesh, the desire, the bruised hips—these reference Sofia’s exploration within her own sexual identity. She has begun a friendship and then an affair with German seamstress Ingrid; they hide their lovemaking from Ingrid’s boyfriend Matthew, who in turn is having an affair with Sofia’s mother’s doctor’s daughter-slash-assistant, Julieta, and the whole thing is not the soap opera that it looks on paper, but rather an opportunity for Sofia to explore the confines of love and realize that it can’t be qualified as simply as she’d like it to be, each pair of people tucked into their specimen box. She also starts sleeping with Juan, the medusa medic, and reflects on the ambiguity of her own feelings and identities, wondering, “Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?”12
These journeys exploring her relationships with her lovers and her father bring her back to her relationship with her mother. She ends the novel more grounded in her identity as sensual woman, as an anthropologist (she’s also decided to restart her PhD, applying for a fellowship in America), and now, as a daughter who supports her mother but has her own life: she successfully confronts Rose about her psychological illness and its effects on Sofia’s life.
In July’s novel, Cheryl has to build a path out of her own imagined identities and fear of loss to confront her external relationships and to accept the mantle of motherhood; in Levy’s, Sofia has to stop assuming her mother’s identities and to carve out her own. Both novels use similar motifs—sexual exploration, physical weakness—to explore themes of family and identity but with different language; July’s is wry and wrought and Levy’s is evaluative and rich. Both were slight departures from what I normally read and both made me pause in moments of complete identification with the inner life and thoughts of a fictional character. And in the end, that’s what drives me to read, to pick up each new story as if it a mirror that will help me better parse my own life—because it is, and it can, and it does.