But Have You Considered That Being an Amoral Drifter Is My Love Language?
Short book notes: Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Fannie Flagg
Creatures, hello! This is just book notes again: Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
I’ve read all three of these novels before (in high school, that’s where I am in my prayer cycle), but I’d forgotten how much they ring against one another. The setting and themes are so similar, and yet the narrative voices and the angles, the arguments-in-character-form, are so different.
All three books take place mostly in the rural past; Sula was published 1973 and takes place roughly from the end of World War I through the mid-’60s, Housekeeping (1980) probably takes place in the mid-’50s, and Tomatoes (1986) covers the Great Depression through the novel’s present day. They all include the confrontation of individual and place: that classic plot, The Town Comes to a Stranger. The hobo life of the Depression era forms part of the setting of the Flagg, and gets a heavily symbolic treatment in Robinson. Men are mostly irrelevant and problematic.
When I read them the first time around, the one I loved was Sula; and Sula was what I loved about it. You could say Sula centers on the Bottom, a poor black town clustered on unwanted hilltop land (“up in the Bottom,” this recurring little absurdity which is revealed to be the result of racism, as absurdity is so often the result of abusive power). Or you could say it centers on the lifelong bond between Sula and Nel, who meet as girls and can’t unhook from one another, despite spending much of the novel not only apart but enemies.
Sula is like, what if that voice from Henderson the Rain King that constantly cries out, “I want, I want, I want” was incarnate as a black woman? She gulps life down, she’ll cut off her own finger to protect you and she’ll also steal your man; she’s a strike-anywhere match and she’s full of surprises. Nel exists in the book mostly to swoon over her and when I read it as a teenage lesbian, by God, so did I.
Now, older, with my edges blunted a bit, I noticed Sula’s existential isolation. She’s as lonely as the Devil and she knows it. Sula doesn’t quite present that isolation as a punishment—if I have a criticism of this book, which maybe I don’t, it’s that it can be sentimental about wrongdoing—but as something inherent in the same kind of life which makes her so rulelessly appealing. This is not a novel about a person who changes. It’s about a person who is, in a particular and difficult way: out of place, dissatisfied; incommensurate.
Housekeeping is about two sisters and the drifter aunt who comes to care for them after a whole bunch of people in their lives die in the local lake. It’s got Robinson’s constant romanticism about loneliness. I found the style mostly hard to take: precious, too finely-wrought, pleased with itself. (Lol what does that mean, to say that prose is pleased with itself? But I felt like I was expected to suck on the caramel perfection of every wry and wistful phrase.) And yet it’s got this persuasive vision of a world of loss, disconnection, decay, drifting—object permanence is just one lifestyle choice among others. The thin flesh of the leaf falls away and only the skeletal branching shafts are left. Every lake remembers when it was part of the Flood, and drowned the world. That’s good stuff. There are set pieces here with sensual, nightmare power: the flooded house, the night the girls have to camp by the lake.
This feels like a first novel: insistent, all of a piece, every single sentence is about one thing. And yet if you can take some plangency, some pounding on the keys, you’ll find that it pulls you under.
And then good old Fried Green Tomatoes, a patchwork novel about an unhappy suburban woman in the ’80s discovering the lives of two small-town women of the past, who made a family together and then got mixed up in a murder. I’m not calling them a lesbian couple on purpose; the novel lets you, the imagined ’80s reader, get that loud and clear, without saying the words. That’s a playful move and/but also part of the way the book normalizes (white) gayness. Some readers will find that heartening and hopeful, the way Ruth and Idgie’s relationship slides so easily into the life and understanding of their small town. I wanted something queerer, something harder to digest, but I always do.
It’s easier to talk about this book’s flaws than its strengths. It’s partly about race in the South, and it thinks it’s advocating for black people but the black characters exist just about entirely in relation to white people’s stories and actions. (This is also true of the white prostitute, an endless source of comfort, she’s Generous With Her Body, heart of gold instead of an inner life etc etc.) It knows it’s indulging in that narcotic, nostalgia, but doesn’t quite realize how deeply and disingenuously it’s imbibing. This is a novel where black people are loyal to their whites and white people are benevolent to their blacks, and if this sounds pretty canine, you’re sure not wrong. Everyone’s good at heart really, the Klansman secretly gives charity to the starving black families (???), the novel is feminist but not in a political way and Christian except when it hurts.
The book’s strength maybe comes from the same source as its weakness: Flagg’s utter attention to the pleasure of her imagined reader. She times her payoffs perfectly, switching with ease among characters and timelines. Those short chapters just breeze by. Flagg was a comedienne and this book balances surprise and satisfaction with the sureness of a veteran entertainer.
At the back of the book there are Southern recipes from, we’re told, the black cook Sipsey, and that is exactly the kind of book this is.
icymi
I reviewed “Great Freedom,” German’s Oscar entry, about love in the time of sodomy laws.
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Abandoned house via Wikimedia Commons.