Friday, September 26, 2014
A story that doesn't quite add up, at least for me
Let me just say I probably don't understand Paul Lafarge's story in current New Yorker, Rosendale (a place name - a seeming upstate slightly artistic NY town perhaps modeled on Hudson?), in which a girl, Annoyingly always referred to as Alice P, who dreams of being a writer, moves to from Boston, lives with an older hippie-ceramicist woman who seems to have a crush on the much-younger April (p); April can't make ends meet takes a job as a stripper or sex worker, which is both politically incorrect and liberating at same time. Ceramicist, whose name I can't remember, evoking the Shelley-Byron contretemps that led to Mary S's composition of Frankenstein, poses a similar contest: who can writer the better horror story. April abandons hers, but later in this story seems to be followed by a Golem figure (based on her view of her roommate's hideous-looking sculpture; at the end, we get a quote from April's writing, and she realizes that she has won the contest. OK so there are multiple layers here: April wishes to become a writer (in my experiences, that's a very different thing from wishing to, or needing to, write), and it appears on some level that the story we are reading is her story. But then how are we getting her back story? She apparently worked in a bar and had the idea of writing a memoir to be called Bar Girl, a chapter of which her community-college writing teacher praised highly - which is a goddamn long way from being a "writer." This all would work better for me if either of the two parts of the story - the rather dreary tale of this lost, mixed-up young woman and the horror story she finds herself living in, or writing - were more compelling and original. In other words, if the story were able to bring together a Joyce Carol Oates type portrayal of a troubled, tough young woman and a Stephen King or Lovecraft horror element, scary and original, that would be some feat; as it is, there's stuff going on here, a character sketched in who could become a protagonist for a much longer piece, a coming of age novel perhaps, and some of the story may have eluded me - there may be connections I'm not making - but at least for me the story doesn't quite add up: 1 + 1 = 1.
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This story blew me away.
ReplyDeleteApril wants to be a writer, and writes: she has something inside her to say, some ccompulsion toward it. She is, actually, a God Damn long way from "being" a writer...a paid,stable, cconsistently writing writer. But she feels compelled to try in that direction. We get clues toward her back story: she thinks it would be a relief to have had your mother die early, she has some early sexual abuse in her family, and the thought of someone taking care of her (as the ceramacist says at one point) so overwhelms her she breaks down sobbing.
It is these parts of her which block her in life and which she needs to exsorcize by writing. They become so loud to her that they are represented to her by the Golem, the thing she can't get away from, but she must face. She goes as far as to think something akin to: 'I cant tell the ceramacist about the Golem watching me in the club, she'll think its repressed memories....' Also, remember what her roommate said the Golum would do: help women in domestic/sexual abuse, etc.
In the end April P has faced her blocks and pulled them out (at least a bit) through writing.
I would say her name is April P, as opposed to just April, to make her one of many.