Mennonite In A Little Black Dress, Rhoda Janzen (365 Books, Day 24)

[rushthatspeaks]

Sometimes I am overcome by the desire to read a bestseller.

It's a zeitgeist thing. I vividly remember that one day on the T between Kendall/MIT and Central, every single other person in the entire subway car was reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It felt like being in a bad horror movie and I rather expected them to mob me, or issue me the required copy. I got so I could recognize that cover a hundred feet away from a tiny sliver of it; that is how it goes with bestsellers. And then people start referring to them, and there start being parodies, and chunks of my acquaintance start assuming I've read whatever the thing is, because I read, don't I? And the critical reviews of this one or that one aren't that terrible, and the movie has actors I like, and I find myself at a bookstore or in a library eying the thing dubiously and then picking it up and sitting down with it and starting to turn pages.

Once (one time) when I was eleven years old I picked up a book simply and solely because it was a bestseller and it was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The rest of the time, it hasn't worked so well. I did read a book and a half of Stieg Larsson, in rapidly increasing incredulity. But generally I might as well stab myself with a fork (an experience remarkably like that of reading John Grisham).

I read this book because I was starting to want to read Eat, Pray, Love. Only the library, you see, hasn't got that. It is on reserve until the end of time, or at any rate until the movie has been out a few months longer.

This book falls into the same general genre-- the divorce memoir-- and also was blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert, so there we go.

Rhoda Janzen is apparently a moderately well-known poet. This book depicts her flight back into the arms of her conservative Mennonite family after her husband of fifteen years divorces her to run off with a guy he met on Gay.com. Or at any rate that is what the back cover summary would like you to think.

In reality, this book is a fascinating clash of authorial voices. There's the smart peppy chicklit voice, as in that summary; there's a foulmouthed tell-it-like-it-is sort of voice, closely related, who reminds me of some of the more confessional blog-types; there's a quieter undercurrent who mentions, between the lines, that in many ways she really is still a Mennonite, that there are things about that upbringing that are still unquestioned, that will always be gravity; there's the voice of the English professor and moderately well-known poet, who is smart, geeky, erudite, witty and charming and apparently considers herself too indelibly dorky to be allowed out in public. (I wish she did not assume that her audience looks down on her for being interested in, for example, fifteenth-century liturgical plays. But assume that she does.)

This is not a good book-- it has no structure, and she is too fond of trying to pull profound revelation out of everyday moments, trying to look at her family both with an air of slight condescension and a belief that they are somehow closer to, well, something or other than she is. She is trying to make herself into a cultural tourist. But she can't, quite, because she doesn't have that fine a control of her tone, and so perversely that flaw is what makes the book interesting, watching her fight for it. Every voice she comes up with is undercut by another facet of herself, every fact she mentions by a different fact.

Her husband left her. True. Of course, it was an abusive marriage, they had already divorced and remarried and reseparated and she called the police on him that one time. She doesn't mention that in the first half of the book.

Her parents are provincial and small-towny. Probably true. Of course, her father was for many years the highest leader of the Mennonite church and her parents have traveled all over the world, to places most people of the type she represents her parents as being are not, theoretically, supposed to be able to find on a map.

She's left her upbringing behind. She swears in Low German without thinking about it.

The thing is, I think it's all real. I think all of her voices and contradictions are her, and each of them is both really a part of her and really also some way that someone else sees her, or that she wants other people to see her. Every time she makes an assertion in one mode, the interests of truth (which she is, I think, trying to serve, the minimum requirement of a real memoir) push her in the opposite. If I thought it were intentional, I'd think it was actually a pretty good way of portraying something of the complexity of herself and the situation.

But I don't think it's intentional, because it fights with itself mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, because it makes her emotional effects fall flat and her beats stretch overlong and her prose snap between very good and terrible.

It is, however, a good way of portraying the complexity of herself and the situation. It's a mess, but it's an alive mess, a breathing one. It is better than I expected.

And now I have satisfied my momentary craving for a divorce memoir, and can hopefully hold out until the next supersaturation of a bestseller.

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

she is too fond of trying to pull profound revelation out of everyday moments

That crystallized something that always bothered me about the books I wound up reading for my book club: there was a good deal of "as I was chopping tomatoes for salsa, I realized that we are all interconnected" and its ilk.

Now, I'm sure people really do have revelations about the universe while chopping vegetables (doing laundry, walking the dog, etc). But the reliability of it, always conveniently placed with regards to the rest of the memoir (if the author is in cooking school for a year, by George, the revelation will come in the last two months... not in the first week, or three years later), makes me imagine the hypothetical memoirist going, "Fuck! I don't have an epiphany! I'd better go buy a lot of potatoes." In other words, the metamessage always seems like it ought to be that revelations come when you least expect them, but in fact the domestic-chore-revelation is so reliable as to be a trope, ergo the opposite of unexpected.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

You would get bonus points for that! Because that's pretty much not allowed in the current genre of memoir, and at this point, anything they don't allow, I'm for.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

"Fuck! I don't have an epiphany! I'd better go buy a lot of potatoes."

Haha! Love it.

[weirdquark]

"Fuck! I don't have an epiphany! I'd better go buy a lot of potatoes."

Now I want someone to write their memoir and use that as the title.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

ME TOO.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

That is so true!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

there was a good deal of "as I was chopping tomatoes for salsa, I realized that we are all interconnected" and its ilk

Yes! That! And it's pretty much a structural thing in memoirs nowadays. This one had a really weird thing where I think she'd been reading a lot of David Sedaris or other essay-length, because it didn't have a book structure, it went entirely chapter by chapter. So in about half of them, you could set your watch by her trying to pull some kind of Deep Meaning out of somewhere or other-- quite often involving some one of her nieces and nephews, who sound like perfectly ordinary kids and therefore not really fonts of cosmic wisdom-- and it was really quite striking how much it was a structural thing and not actually a her-life thing and I wished she'd give up on it.

Except for the fact that it really clearly was philosophical speculation she'd actually engaged in and she put it in that particular spot because that is where you put it. Not false, just real content shoved into conventional form, which made the whole thing even weirder.

I would pay money to see someone go buy a lot of potatoes in search of precisely-timed revelation.

the 107th potato

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I would pay money to see someone go buy a lot of potatoes in search of precisely-timed revelation.

--and then the book title would be the number of the potato at which the epiphany hit

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

There's a thing people sometimes do which drives me crazy, and it sounds like this memoirist does it--though you've managed to pull something interesting out of it. That thing is, telling people general characteristics about yourself. The first time I recall noticing this phenomenon was when I was on a hike with a woman I didn't know very well. I'd say something like, "Oh look! Look at that beech tree there!" and she'd say, "Oh, yes, I'm the kind of person who loves trees. I relate well with trees. Trees are so important to me." Later on, if I said something like, "Mmm, the water feels blissful" if we waded across a stream, she'd say, "Yeah, I'm the type of person who always wants to throw off her shoes and walk in the water." It was a real-life version of telling instead of showing. I wanted fewer declarations about what type of person she was and more just living and doing. And that's what it seems like this memoirist is doing: taking some piece of evidence from her life and declaring, "See? I'm the type of person who ..." but then, as you point out, there's the contradictory evidence.

Quick EDIT to add: the above person is NO ONE I HAVE BECOME FRIENDS WITH ONLINE. I have gone walking in the woods with lots of people I've met through LJ. Friends, if you read this entry, it is not you. It's no one online.

I guess in general I wish people wouldn't try to categorize themselves to me. I'm never sure what the category means to them, or what its boundaries are, and in any case, I'd like to meet or get to know a person in all their particularity rather than as a member of some category they have in their mind.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

(I think you've just clarified for me the reason it bugs me so much when someone I know says she's "not an X person" when she doesn't like things. She's trying to categorize herself by brute force, as you say, and I'm just left thinking, "really? you know exactly all that you are and will ever be? sounds awful." Thanks.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that indicates a kind of-- not expecting possibilities, I guess? I think the only times I've ever used the 'not an x person' construction are about things I have actual medical issues with, like onions and rugby. (And even there, I would totally be a rugby person, but the doctor told me stop it, so I'm not, dammit, which is I think a slightly different tone of that construction.) About things I just don't like, it's more like 'I haven't found a way to cook broccoli that I really like yet'. (Which, sadly, I haven't.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I had not pictured you as playing rugby, but now I am all pleased to know that you would play. I definitely prefer the including-possibilities modes of speech and living.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I just hate the generalizing quality of it. Why invent a category for yourself? If you like daisies, especially in early morning light, when they have shadows on them, and especially if a breeze is blowing through them, why feel compelled to say, "I'm the type of person who... (etc.)" I mean, honestly, what type is that, anyway? Why not just like the daisies and to hell with the type of person that makes you?

And yeah, in your acquaintance's case, one wonders if she's thought of all the things she's excluding when she says she's not an X person.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's a way to make oneself special by denying daisy-liking category status to the person one's talking to? But why? I'm not sure if I like this possibility more or less than the one where there are entire subsets of people who categorize each other and themselves constantly rather than just saying what they think or enjoy.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in general when people do it, I think they're trying to delineate a community or group that they're part of--maybe it makes them less lonely? When I think of it that way, it's sort of forgivable... I guess it's more the habit of speech than the actual desire to be part of a group that I dislike.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yes. She does a lot of that in this book, and I was really glad that she doesn't manage to limit herself to her own categories, that all the contradictory evidence does just keep bubbling up, because it would have been really depressing if she'd had the kind of ability to represent herself by these categories that I think she wanted to have. She would have felt like half a person.

(It helped that some of her categories were just kind of blatantly wrong. Like, she'd say, 'oh I am so geeky', and I'd think to myself 'there is truth in that, in that that is usually considered a geeky interest, but oh, honey, hang out with me and my friends and we'll show you geeky-- happily geeky, too'.)

I've never been around anyone who persistently does it in real life and I can totally imagine that driving you crazy! I would probably have said something impolitic: "Are you the type of person who ever shuts up about what type of person you are?"

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That last remark made me laugh out loud.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Once (one time) when I was eleven years old I picked up a book simply and solely because it was a bestseller and it was Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The rest of the time, it hasn't worked so well.

Might you perhaps expand on that a little? I mostly like Eco a lot, but I have no idea how I would have reacted to that book at eleven.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I read it at about the same age and was highly confused but also fascinated. Enough of a memorable reaction to come back to it later (a little shyly), at least.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

It was awesome. The conspiracy theory aspects made perfect sense to me, and the moral ambiguities mostly went over my head, but not so much that I couldn't tell there was something there; I enjoyed it as a suspense novel and then went back to it years later.