-- I suppose I should reread Daisy Miller, except I was barely able to finish it in the first place, decades ago ('"My dear young friend," said Mrs. Walker, taking her hand pleadingly, "don't walk off to the Pincio at this hour to meet a beautiful Italian"'). No, I guess the James that belongs in this messy bundle, not even gathered-together, but chaos seen as a pattern like fallen yarrow sticks, is Princess Casamassina, which I have around here somewhere. I remember Louise Bogan loved it. (Useless literary trivia I have stored in my brain instead of phone numbers: a moment from the fantastic Louise Bogan biography by Elizabeth Frank, probably long out of print by now, someone catching a glimpse at a New York City literary party of her sitting in Hart Crane's lap. I wish I had a photograph of that moment, I'd frame it. At least the people at the artsy New York parties in those days dressed better.) I'm reasonably sure there won't be any women falling in love with men who finger them through draped public art displays in a James novel. Reason enough to read him. Where's my goddamn copy, I guess I can download a free version from Gutenberg, oh ghod, the waking nightmare of Jamesian sentence structure....
I skimmed maybe a third of this, especially the early bits: the seminal (ho, ho) scene with Ronnie-the-asshole in the Chelsea Hotel (what, really?), the bits about the guys making tires oh God what is this John McPhee or something, the really bad bits about the 'motherfucking' fake revolutionaries (if you're going to rip off Stokely Carmichael's line do you have to give it to a white guy who's also in the art scene?). The vague, limp, artfully artless disaffectedness inherited from Tama Janowitz, back when Tama Janowitz was not a joke, a joke without a punchline. The old boredom of how do you portray the macho art scene without glorifying macho assholeness (short answer: you can't). The parts set in Italy were very good: the terrible not-mother-in-law, the grasping rich, the revolutionaries -- when Kushner wrote about the street protests the pages (virtual, on the Kindle, look it's metaphorical) came alive, you could smell the gasoline, the lemons, feel the heft of the passed guns.
-- And then it turned back into a book about what it's like to be a pretty young American girl all the men want to fuck and all the women hate because the men want to fuck them. What the hell. Can't we have a book about the woman artist for once? Diane Arbus or Lee Miller or Lee Krasner? They were all there too, you know, we were there, we were....Joyce Johnson even wrote a wonderful book about it, Minor Characters, that book in particular about the women Beats, but really the eternal female artist, the Woman Question: the missing in action, the abused and the disappeared, the lost and forgotten. Why am I reading about Ronnie-the-asshole and Sandro-the-asshole and Stanley-the-asshole? It's not even like they're good artists. Is that the point? What the point is, is now I have to read another three pages of Ronnie-the-asshole lecturing the Nameless Female Narrator (Daphne du Maurier wants her bit back) in order for Nameless to 'realize,' "I was the girl on layaway. And it wasn't Ronnie who'd put me on layaway. It was something I had done to myself."
And I'm just like, After all those pages about sexism and macho assholes and cheating men, the insight is, I have done it to myself? Oh, fuck you. Is this where feminism really and truly, after the skirted Suit Dresses with the little plaid bows of the eighties, after the Do Me Fuck Toys of the nineties, the Mommy Track quislings of the 00s, after-after-after, ends up, after all? In the slick women's magazine advice columns of I have done it to myself? Fuck, what about Italian feminism? Does Nameless have to fuck the distant cool male revolutionary? Can't she for once wind up in the kitchen, if not the barricades, instead of the bedroom, talking to the women, instead of fucking the men? What about Leopoldina Fortunati? -- Wait, is the revolutionary's girlfriend who hates Nameless seriously supposed to be directing Radio Alice? Is Radio Alice seriously only going to get half a sentence? Are you truly not going to include a reference to Carla Lonzi's glorious "Let's Spit on Hegel"? (Shit, now I want to write a novel about radical Italian feminists in the seventies just to include "Let's Spit on Hegel." Spitting on Hegel: best fucking idea ever.)
It's like Fear of Flying redux: Nameless films the revolution (At last! I thought. All the themes of the book are coming together!), but then loses her camera, fucks the male revolutionary, and then goes home, just like Isadora Wing ran off with one man only to return to another. But at least Fear of Flying had some feminism in it; it had to, it was written in 1973. -- Even Tama goddamn Janowitz didn't go that far. It was something I had done to myself. Christ almighty. Why not just go ahead and paste in a Ryan Gosling meme, while we're at it.
-- And yet, Kushner's prose style is skilfull enough, and she's good enough at making basically-nothing-happening seem interesting for long stretches that I didn't mind there wasn't much actual plot, more a coalescence of themes, a collection of images, word-collages: bikes, girls who ride bikes, the men who fuck girls who ride bikes, revolution, sexism, conceptual art, actual street art, poseurs, ignorance, naievete, pretentiousness. Innocence and experience. The workers and the profiteers, the artists lusting after fame, becoming part of the New York money machine. The true theme: exploitation. Nameless' narrative voice is indeed good, even though the dialogue is bad, stiltedly literary and impossibly long, "bookish" (the anti-me, Dwight Garner, of course fucking zeroes right in on that: "One of the best things about this book, though, is how much it gets out of Reno’s own head. The dialogue pops; many of the best observations are doled out to supporting characters." OH MY GOD. NO. If I just buy everything Dwight Garner hates sooner or later I'll probably find my new favourite book) (it's certainly not this one).
-- What kind of book is this? It's a book in which an anecdote about Georgia O'Keeffe (spotlit first by Joan Didion, so, not very original there) is told by the asshole male artist love interest without even naming her at all. That's what kind of book this is. It's like Radio Alice barely getting a mention, and going nameless, too, like the heroine. We have had enough of nameless diminished women.
Didion:
In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. ‘That evening star fascinated me,’ she wrote. ‘… My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot them. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.’ In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.
Kushner:
She told Sandro she had gotten the idea for her most important cycle of works when she was walking with her sister on an empty Texas plain one summer evening, a single star in the sky above them. They were teenagers. This was before cars, before World War One. “My sister had a gun and kept throwing bottles up in the air and shooting them,” she had told Sandro. “We walked under the big empty twilight and that star.” There had to be an element of chance. But also precision. An occasional dead-on hit. My sister had a gun.
(Dear Dwight Garner: this is the reason that you think the book sounds like Joan Didion. And why the hell am I still reading your reviews, anyway....)
*I don't read those terrible prize-baiting "Ten Under Forty" or "Twenty Under Thirty" or "Thirty Under Ten" collections on principle. The principle being, I want to live until I die of old age and not spontaneously combust in raging jealous despair. Look, I never said I was a good person.