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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 1987)
LAMBDA RISING BOOK REPORT - 4 Two Lesbians, a Baby, a Butter Pat & a Body by Laura Markowitz THE GIRLS is a refreshing change from lesbian Amazonian Utopia novels or depressingly realistic tales of heartache and oppression. If you like a lighthearted tone and suspenseful plot. THE GIRLS is a sat isfying, enjoyable read. Starting off a bit slowly, the plot comes together neatly. Susan discovers that she is bored and dissatisfied in the neanidyllic life with Janet. The two have a small farm and craft shop in a sleepy village of rural Eng land. Susan is not actually certain of the nature of her feelings. “She was going nowhere...they were a refuge for each other, she and Janet;...their whole life was not more than a retreat from life. The had made a Wendy House together, and hid in it.” Bowen justifies Susan’s impression with prosaic descriptions of the lovely coziness of their life. Susan feels stifled by it. She goes off to Greece for three weeks on a package tour to sort things out. Meanwhile, Janet undergoes severe bouts of jealousy and pain and winds up becoming pregnant (inadvertantly, alth ough not in any unpleasant way). Susan returns, relieved to be back to their self- created little paradise. The baby adds a new dimension of activity to their lives and things roll along smoothly. Conflict arrives in the person of the uninformed father. The closer he comes to realizing the parentage of the child, the more nervoua Susan becomes. “Susan's instinct told her that society would destroy the admirable arrangement if it could..Jtheir familyj unit survived by being private and self-contained." Suaan'a instincts for self- preservation take hold. She hits him over the head with a butter pat. "...She had not meant to hurt him anymore than one means to hurt a fly...One wishes only to be rid of the flies." Stated in these terms, with no hyperbole, the accidental murder makes perfect sense to the reader, is really very convenient. Now life can continue on in the same unexceptional way. But of course, there is the body to contend with. The remainder of the novel describes the cover-up and investigation. Bowen characterizes everyone’s feelings about the crime but he (via the girls) avoids overin dulging in emotionality. Sprinkled in along side the question of the murder are various village personalities from the gossip to the eccentric pig farmer to the semi-corrupt con stable. Bowen balances the potentially serious storyline with colorful descriptions of craft fairs, flower shows, and the village itself. He even goes so far as to tell the reader, in great detail, the process of goat cheese making, and birthing a baby. While the success of THE GIRLS is in its credibility, the weakness of the novel lies in its failure to resolve most of the gay issues which it raises. Janet and her mother confront ing of their life together, is not addressed. It is understandable; Bowen keeps to the susp enseful theme. Everything is presented casually. The reader can think about it if so inclined. THE GIRLS is entertaining in some ways just because it does not engage these concerns. As far as THE GIRLS is a rendering of a lesbian relationship from a male per spective, it is not offensive. Aside from the stereotype he chooses (of the wholesome, homesteading lesbians) he leaves “the girls” their private life. Happily, there is no voyeur^ ism in these passages, although he sacrifices any descriptions of physical loving between them altogether. Bowen gets away without being disagreeable because the book is not trying to discuss lesbianism. In fact, the women themselves don’t go into much analysis about it. “The girls were an old fashioned couple as the still are. They had come together in the days when the Wom en’s Movement was at its most militant and many wife and mother was led into lesbianism by having her consciousness raised, but Susan had never heard of the Women’s Mov ement and Janet was not sure that she approved of what she had heard. Instead, they fell innocently in love.” Bowen makes it seem as if the characters in his story just happen to be lesbians, and he is skillful in having us believe it while confidently playing on it throughout the plot. One tactic is his language. The voice is recognizable. It comb ines playful and distinctly British prose in the style of Sayers or Wodehouse with very untraditional subject matter. We are reas sured and have confidence in it. Assuming the unconventional be commonplace is a won one another in a bewilderingly hurtful way derful tactic for to creating a society where gay that never works out satisfactorily. Attemp relationships simply are accepted and take for ting to get through to her disappointed granted. mother, Janet yells: “Sexual orientation, mother, is not whom you fuck, its whom you love” and then drives off in anger. That is the last interaction they have. Susan’s initial Laura Markowitz, young as she is, has doubts about her life are not trivial yet noth already lived a full life. Her scholarship won ing comes of them. She has a lousy holiday, her a fellowship for which she lived in various comes home, they have a baby. It’s almost too women’s spiritual communities in Europe, neat. Of course, it isn’t so neat since her total and the Middle East. She also took an dependence on the relationship becomes evid Asia aboriginal skills course and can survive in ent in the necessity for murder. The issue the desert life using aboriginal techniques. She surrounding the women’s intimacy, the mean speaks French, Hebrew and Sinhalese. Tea, Sympathy & Coming of Age by David Perry Sarah Rossiter’s first novel is highly evocative and mysterious, redolent of that highly emotional autumnal memory that seems so much a part of America’s collegiate consciousness. THE HUMAN SEASON, Is one of those cherished books to be read on a rainy afternoon, bouillon at the ready. It’s strength lies in its sheer, almost poetic beauty and economy of its writing. It’s weak ness in the fact that we seem to have read this story before. CATCHER IN THE RYE is the quin tessential novel of the boarding school experience. Indeed, of adolescence itself. Like a great fulcrum, it demands balancing com parison from all that has come before and after. CATCHER IN THE RYE seems always to have been. Authors diving into that vast and oh so tempting pool of innocence lost, do so at risk of this most tempting of Compaq ¡sons. THE HUMAN SEASON is no dif ferent. It is no CATCHER IN THE RYE. though it often rings of it, as well as of other similar treatments. Although, Rossiter's lyr ical prose is more akin to the silken ease of Edmund White than that of Salinger” s rough hewn reality. Rossiter‘s hero, Peter Spaulding, is a Holden Caulfield for the eighties. His fears, his coubts, his sexual awakening are no dif ferent from the eons of other boys before him. They merely come in an age when it is no longer taboo to speak of them. Excepting, of course, at Dunster-as ivy covered a school as any conceived-to where Peter was shipped off four vpars ago by a new stepfather and care THE HUMAN SEASON, by Sarah Rossiter (Little, Brown A Company, 276 pp. $16.951. less mother. His father, also remarried, "First there was Manning. appears equally as uninterested. Peter’s sole Then there was his wife. He familial bond is in that of his new, chain called her Cate. I called her smoking stepmother, Judith. Mrs. Manning. Mrs. Oliver Austin Manning III. We met Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Peter Spaulding speaks to us directly. Rossiter’s two years ago when she was first person is cleverly handled, easily slip twenty, and I was almost seven ping into reverie and flashback without teen. Yesterday she was noticable distraction. The novel opens with twenty-two.“ Peter in his room, pondering where to begin Also yesterday, the reader soon learns his tale: through 1 Mrs. MacQuire, a befriending Reprise i - faculty wife, Cate committed suicide. No sooner has the triangle been extablished than it is dashed, along with Peter’s illusions. The remainder of the novel will be Peter’s attempt to sort out the mystery, for he is convinced that Manning actually killed his young wife. However, this is no murder mystery. Nor is it the byzantine machinations of an overly romantic juvenile. Without destroying the story, it is safe to divulge that soon (had you not already guessed it) we learn of Peter’s divided loyalties. There has been a tryst with Cate, and one assumes also a homosexual experience with Manning. Even the "regal“ Mrs. MacQuire carries a secret; and a plot ting school chum, Edwards, who would be in good company with Salinger’s Stradlater, adds complications. In less skillful hands, these twisted plot lines would appear lugubrious, even trite. Howver, Rossiter handles her subject and her prose with a steady and deft narration. "Peo ple are like onions,“ Judith tells her stepson Peter early on. ’’They’ve got layers. Peel one off, there’s another underneath. The older you get, the more there are.“ And fulfilling her own metaphor, Ros siter peels away her story like a diaphonous onion skin. Many times the flesh is sweet like a vidalia, but at others, it is pungent, making our eyes moist with the steadily increasing pile of secrets laid bare-the incessantly revea led truth at the core. And, it is this peeling away by which THE HUMAN SEASON gives the most pleasure--the simple elegance of Rossiter's style. The anticipated den- Continued on page 10 Books & other products reviewed or advertised in the BOOK REPORT are available at your local gay & lesbian bookstore & Lambda Rising.