In Praise of Messy Lives (11 page)

All unhappy families may have been unhappy in their own fashion in the days when Tolstoy wrote the famous opening lines of
Anna Karenina
, but today’s unhappy families—at least in fiction—seem pretty much the same. It often happens that I am in a bookstore leafing through one of the attractive new hardcovers, when my eye catches a phrase on the inside jacket: “until she is forced to come to terms with the dark secret of her harrowing past.” I know without reading any further what the dark secret is, and my heart sinks:
another novel about incest
.

Sexual abuse, of course, is everywhere splashed across the culture, wept about on talk shows, endlessly reported in the news, and writers of fiction have obligingly followed suit; incest has become our latest literary vogue. We are deluged with descriptions of fathers taking their daughters on their laps and sliding their hands under their skirts or creeping into their bedrooms in the middle of the night. These images appear not only in bestselling books like Stephen King’s
Gerald’s Game
but also in the quieter pages of what we consider serious literary fiction, books that win Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Critics Circle Awards,
like Jane Smiley’s
A Thousand Acres
. Here the ancient theme of
Oedipus Rex
is accompanied by the clattering breakfast plates of twentieth-century realism and the tragic, shimmering myth becomes an actual event described in pornographic detail. As any consumer of current fiction will notice, our bookshelves are filled with stories of the family romance getting a little too romantic: Donna Tartt’s
The Secret History
, E. Annie Proulx’s
The Shipping News
, Amy Bloom’s
Come to Me
, Dorothy Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina
, Joyce Carol Oates’s
You Must Remember This
, Heather Lewis’s
House Rules
, Margaret Atwood’s
The Robber Bride
, Marilyn French’s
Our Father
, Mary Gaitskill’s
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
, Geoffrey Wolff’s
The Age of Consent
, Anne Rice’s
The Witching Hour
, Josephine Hart’s
Damage
, and Russell Banks’s
The Sweet Hereafter
, to name only a few.

One of the most talked-about bidding wars in the publishing world this year was not over a new thriller by Michael Crichton or John Grisham but over a half-written first novel by an unknown female poet who calls herself Sapphire. “I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver [
sic
],” the unpublished manuscript of
Push
begins.
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Set in the projects of Harlem, the story reveals a teenage girl who is sexually abused not just by her father but by her obese mother as well. Sapphire announces, “We is a nation of raped children.” Whatever the truth of that, we are certainly a nation that wants to read about them.

Of course, every generation of writers pursues the mirage of the zeitgeist. In the twenties, writers became enamored with disaffected
Americans in Europe, and in the thirties they discovered migrant workers and tenement dwellers. In the sixties they became obsessed with psychiatrists and neuroses, and in the eighties they found revelation in drugs and urban anomie. Each decade a batch of novels are announced as electric, explosive, original, articulate of our most pressing concerns. But zeitgeist fiction works like a newspaper. Most of the books that seemed so new, so relevant, so absolutely of the moment, fade. We are left with the best of these books, which are good not because they are about the subject everyone was discussing that year but in spite of it.

The current trend, it seems, blew north from the hot porches of Southern literature. The heirs of the gothic imaginations of writers like William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell appeared at first to be mostly black women writers. The graphic sexual abuse in Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eye
(1970) and Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(1971) offered the prototypes for the modern incest scene. After that came Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
(1982), with the memorable incestuous moment—“he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around”—on the first page. Then, in the eighties, the alchemy of academia and politics created a mainstream fascination with victims of all kinds; the concurrent rise of a certain pop-feminist sensibility made sexual victims particularly compelling—even requisite. By the early nineties, incest had swept across the literary map of America—into Mona Simpson’s California cities, Jane Smiley’s flat Midwestern farmlands, Mary Gaitskill’s middle-class suburbs, Russell Banks’s small upstate New York towns, and even E. Annie Proulx’s icy Canadian islands.

Novelists, we know, have been fascinated by incest for almost as long as there have been novels: in 1722, Daniel Defoe’s racy
heroine Moll Flanders discovers that the man she is happily married to is actually her brother. But in the glare of all the television lights and cameras focused on sexual abuse and recovered memory, today’s incest scenes have an unmistakably current feel. “Why is there this empty place in my memory?” writes Marilyn French in her novel
Our Father
, her prose virtually vibrating with timeliness. A hundred pages later it turns out that there is an “empty place” in Alex’s memory because her rich and politically powerful father molested her when she was in diapers. As the eighty-two-year-old patriarch lies in a coma, Alex and her three sisters, one of whom is the illegitimate daughter of the maid, gather together in his mansion and discover that he has had sex with all of them, as well as with one of his granddaughters. “It was so awful! It hurt and I didn’t want it!” exclaims one of the sisters. In the climactic scene of disclosure, the story merges with something we just read in
People
or a scandal we just saw on the local news. The writer raises her voice to the ecstatic confessional pitch of
Oprah
and borrows the easy intimacy of that medium.

Smiley’s critically acclaimed
A Thousand Acres
is the most prominent example of the new genre. In it, Smiley gives us a sixteenth-century drama with a twentieth-century twist: a sexually abusive
King Lear
set in the pastoral cornfields of modern Iowa. This time around, the daughters, Ginny and Rose, have every reason to be angry at their strong-willed father. When they were young, the respected pillar of the community entered their yellow-and-pink-flowered bedrooms and had sex with them. Rose remembers and Ginny forgets. On finding out the dark secret, the reader is supposed to think with satisfaction,
Oh yes, now it all falls into place:
Ginny’s passivity, Rose’s hardness, their fear and anger and cruelty, their putting their father out in the furious
storm—all make perfect sense. But what the reader really feels is frustration at the spectacle of a skillful writer using such a cheap trick: it’s terrible to watch the potential grandeur of the book, the daughters’ greed and bitterness, and all of the eternal mysteries of the Lear story collapse into such a politically trendy and prosaically simple solution.

If in
A Thousand Acres
incest works as a kind of bargain-basement epiphany, Smiley is not alone. In
Our Father
,
The Age of Consent
,
House Rules
, and countless other novels, the entire story is reduced to a riddle, and incest is the answer. The riddle goes something like this: Mary or Maisie or Rose is acting kind of strange. She is fat or promiscuous or bitter or she dives headfirst into a shallow pond, and it turns out, many pages later, that Mary or Maisie or Rose was molested as a child by her father or stepfather or father figure. The discovery of the central fact is like a flash of lightning illuminating the entire book.

We have come to expect psychological lightning from the books we read on beaches and buses and trains. We want motives, symptoms, childhood traumas. We want years on the analyst’s couch condensed into a single paragraph. We want the deep pleasure of what reviewers call “penetrating psychological insight,” but we don’t, it would appear, want to work too hard for it. Novels like Smiley’s offer the perfect solution—the therapeutic thrill of delving into the past combined with the convenience of prepackaged interpretation: one overarching explanation for everything that’s gone wrong. Such books operate on the idea, borrowed from talk shows, that the complexity of human character must be presented, analyzed, and solved in the space of one hour, not including commercials.

Is the subject of incest, then, inherently cheap? Not necessarily.
But the situation itself is so extreme that it grabs our interest with very little skill on the part of the writer—like a murder or a car crash, it jolts us into the story. As the father reaches under his daughter’s nightgown, we can’t help but be fascinated. Amy Bloom may be a talented writer, but when she writes about a mother having sex with her stepson she doesn’t really have to be; she gets our attention anyway. A Freudian would say that seeing this subconscious stuff dramatized appeals to our most primal fears and fantasies. Whatever the appeal, the situation itself, as in the following instance from Mary Gaitskill’s
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
, demands our sympathy:

Gaitskill’s words are forceful. You have to feel horror, and the breathless panic of the thirteen-year-old being molested by her father. Gaitskill continues: “My flannel gown scrunched up around my shoulders and my buttocks rubbed by what felt like the blunt, hairless limb of a medium-sized animal.” Because of the nature of the crime, the characters tend to be separated in crude shorthand: father, evil; daughter, innocent. The girl with her nightgown scrunched up over her shoulders versus “the
blunt, hairless limb of a medium-sized animal.” Because the drama is so literal, we get none of the play of the shadowy tensions in, say,
Hamlet
, none of the everyday tangle of ambiguities, hopes, pleasures, disillusionments, depressions of a novel by an author like John Updike, who writes about the human world in all of its radiant confusion.

There is, nonetheless, something tough and appealing about writers like Gaitskill, Simpson, and Allison writing about the traditional domestic scene in a way that Louisa May Alcott would never have dreamed of doing. At their best, books about incest have, like Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina
, the irreverent, anarchic energy that comes from exposing one’s family of origin. But at its worst, incest fiction has the lifeless feel of a feminist textbook. “Let me tell you what it was
really
like,” the writer seems to whisper in our ear, but so often that reality seems to be a stitched-together collection of political clichés. “I was like something he owned,” writes Simpson. “You … felt … that fathers owned the bodies of their daughters,” writes French. “We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops,” writes Smiley. At moments like these, one hears the political wheels turning beneath the prose. French dedicates
Our Father
to Gloria Steinem, and we definitely feel Steinem picketing in her prose: “The only thing the four of them had in common was his … abuse. Maybe that was all women as a sex had in common.” After reading these lines, the incest, no matter how dramatically described, appears to be simply an illustration of a political point.

This particular dark view of the family comes straight out of a literary tradition that began in the seventies with the profusion of men-are-bastards fiction; in the lively pages of well-loved
novels by writers like Hilma Wolitzer and Nora Ephron, husbands were always having affairs with their pregnant wives’ best friends.
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Incest was the natural next step: men are not just bastards; they’re monsters.

As if the political predictability of these incest scenes is not bad enough, there is also an astonishing sameness to the way they are staged, even by writers with wildly different voices. Whether they are narrated in the expressionless eighties deadpan of Simpson, Lewis, and Gaitskill, or with the tremulous anger of Atwood and French, or the hallucinatory frenzy of King, the scenes themselves follow strikingly similar patterns. They are all rendered with pornographic precision (none of the head-turning innuendo of the incest in, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night
). We see the act in cinematic detail—the penis, usually described as a “hard thing,” and the underwear, always described as “panties.” The drama itself is also recounted in remarkably similar terms: “He pushed my skirt to the side and slid his left hand down between my legs,” writes Allison. “He’d slide his hand … up my leg, under my skirt,” writes Banks. “He puts … his hands up under her pleated school skirts and slides her panties right down,” writes Atwood. Then come the obligatory fingers: “His fingers … gouging me,” writes Gaitskill. “His fingers gouged at me,” writes Allison. “He was tearing my insides,” writes French.
“He was tearing me apart,” writes Allison. And then there are the literal images of radical detachment: “My arms and legs flew from my pinned body to the corners of the ceiling, then back into their sockets, then back to the ceiling,” writes Gaitskill. “She flies over to the window and in behind the curtain,” writes Atwood.

By this point we anticipate the rhythms, the rubbing and touching in the lap scene, the father’s smell, the escalation, the sneaking into bedrooms, the shame, the confusion, the disembodied child watching the scene from above. It all comes to sound the same—the stock plot of a culture obsessed with sexual abuse. What may once have been a daring subject, what astonished in Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eye
, has now become paralyzed literary convention.
^*